
JOHN RUSKIN. 



THE CROWN OF 
WILD OLIVE ^ 

AND LECTURES ON ART 
By JOHN RUSKIN 

Author of "THE SEVEN LAMPS OP ARCHI- 
TECTURE," "THE STONES OF VENICE," 
"MODERN PAINTERS," "ARROWS OF THE 
CHASE," etc., etc. >€ ^ ^^ >< >< n^ 




A. L BURT COMPANY, Publishers 
52-55 Duane street, New York 



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GIFT 

MAURICE DU PONT LEE 

FEB. 6, 1946 

Piioperty ol the 
lAbrary of Congress 



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CONTENTS. 

THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

WOBK. 1 

LECTURE n. 
Tkaffic 42 

LECTURE in. 
War , 76 

LECTLTRES OlS" AET. 



LECTURE I. 
Inaugural 123 

LECTURE II. 
The Relation of Art to Religion 156 

LECTURE III. 
The Relation of Art to Morals 188 

LECTURE IV. 
The Relation of Art to Use 217 

LECTURE V. 
Line 246 

LECTURE VI. 
Light 270 

LECTURE VII. 
Color. 301 



PREFACE, 



Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of 
lowland scenery in South England, nor any more 
pathetic in the world, by its expression of sweet 
human character and life, than that immediately 
bordering on the sources of the Wandle, and includ- 
ing the lower moors of Addington, and the villages of 
Eeddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and 
streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sung 
with constant lips of the hand which "giveth rain 
from heaven ;'' no pastures ever lightened in spring- 
time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter 
homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with 
their pride of peaceful gladness — fain-hidden — yet 
full confessed. The place remains, or, until a few 
months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in its larger 
features ; but, with deliberate mind I say, that I 
have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner 
tragic meaning — not in Pisan Maremma — not by 
Campagna tomb — not by the sand-isles of the Tor- 
cellan shore — as the slow stealing of aspects of reck- 
less, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweet- 
ness of that English scene : nor is any blasphemy or 



iv PBEFAGB. 

impiety — any frantic saying or godless thought more 
appalling to me, using the best power of judgment 
I have to discern its sense and scope, than the in- 
solent defilings of those springs by the human herds 
that drink of them. Just where the welling of 
stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of 
light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a 
radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of 
feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with 
its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in 
moss-agate, starred here and there with white 
grenouillette ; just in the very rush and murmur of 
the first spreading currents, the human wretches of 
the place cast their street and house foulness ; heaps 
of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, 
and rags of putrid clothes ; they having neither energy 
to cart it away, nor decency enough to dig it into 
the ground, thus shed into the stream, to diffuse 
what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all 
places where God meant those waters to bring joy 
and health. And, in a little pool, behind some houses 
further in the village, where another spring rises, 
the shattered stones of the well, and of the little 
fretted channel which was long ago built and traced 
for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each frem each, 
under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria ; and 
bricklayers' refuse, on one side, which the clear 
water nevertheless chastises to purity ; but it can- 



PREFACE, V 

not conquer the dead earth beyond ; and there, circled 
and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge 
of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, 
the accumulation of indolent years. Half a dozen 
men, with one day's work, could cleanse those pools, 
and trim the flowers about their banks, and make 
every breath of summer air above them rich with 
cool balm ; and every glittering wave medicinal, as 
if it ran, troubled of angels, from the porch of 
Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor 
will be ; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, 
for evermore, about those wells of English waters. 

When I last left them, I walked up slowly 
through the back streets of Croydon, from the 
old church to the hospital; and, just on the left, 
before coming up to the crossing of the High 
Street, there was a new public-house built. And 
the front of it was built in so wise manner, that 
a recess of two feet was left below its front 
windows, between them and the street-pavement — 
a recess too narrow for any possible use (for 
even if it had been occupied by a seat, as in old 
time it might have been, everybody walking along 
the street would have fallen over the legs of the 
reposing wayfarers). But, by way of making this 
two feet depth of freehold land more expressive 
of the dignity of an establishment for the sale of 
spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the pavement 



Vi PREFACE. 

by an imposing iron railing, having four or five 
spear-heads to the yard of it, and six feet high ; 
containing as much iron and iron-work, indeed, as 
could well be put into the space; and by this 
stately arrangement, the little piece of dead ground 
within, between wall and street, became a protective 
receptacle of refuse ; cigar-ends, and oyster-shells, and 
the like, such as an open-handed English street-popu- 
lace habitually scatters from its presence, and was thus 
left, unsweepable by any ordinary methods. Now the 
iron bars which, uselessly (or in great degree worse 
than uselessly), inclosed this bit of ground, and made 
it pestilent, represented a quantity of work which 
would have cleansed the Carshalton pools three times 
over — of work, partly cramped and deadly, in the 
mine ; partly fierce"^ and exhaustive, at the furnace ; 
partly foolish and sedentary, of ill- taught students 

* " A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near Wolver- 
liampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as tlie 
* keeper ' of a blast-furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, 
aged eighteen, and Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace 
contained four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount 'of cinders, 
and ought to have been run out at 7:30 P. M. But Snape and his 
mates, engaged in talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and, in 
the meantime, the iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe 
wherein water was contained. Just as the men had stripped, and 
were proceeding to tap the furnace, the water in the pipe, converted 
into steam, burst down its front and let loose on them the molten 
metal, which instantaneously consumed Gardner. Snape, terribly 
burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into the canal and then ran home and 
fell dead on the threshold. Swift survived to reach the hospital, 
where ue died too," 



PREFACE. Vii 

making bad designs : work from the beginning to the 
last fruits of it, and in all the branches of it, venomous, 
deathful, and miserable. E'ow, how did it come to 
pass that this work was done instead of the other ; 
that the strength and life of the English operative 
were spent in defiling ground, instead of redeeming it ; 
and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless 
piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor 
breathed, instead of medicinal fresh air, and pure 
water ? 

There is but one reason for it, and at present a con- 
clusive one — that the capitalist can charge per- 
centage on the work in the one case, and cannot in 
the other. If, having certain funds for supporting 
labor at my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my 
ground in order, my money is, in that function, spent 
once for all ; but if I pay them to dig iron out of my 
ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for 
the ground, and percentage both on the manufacture 
and the sale, and make my capital profitable in these 
three by-ways. The greater part of the profitable in- 
vestment of capital, in the present day, is in opera- 
tions of this kind, in which the public is persuaded to 
buy something of no use to it, on production, or sale, 
of which, the capitalist may charge percentage; the 
said public remaining all the while under the persua- 
sion that the percentages thus obtained are real 
national gains, Avhereas, they are merely filchings 



viii PREFACE, 

out of partially light pockets, to swell heavy 
ones. 

Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, 
to make himself more conspicuous to drunkards. The 
public-house-keeper on the other side of the way pres- 
ently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. Both 
are, as to their relative attractivness to customers of 
taste, just w^here they were before; but they have 
lost the price of the railings ; ^vhich they must either 
themselves finally lose, or make their aforesaid cus- 
tomers of taste pay, by raising the price of their beer, 
or adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their cus- 
tomers, are thus poorer by precisely what the cap- 
italist has gained; and the value of the work itself, 
meantime, has been lost to the nation ; the iron bars 
in that form and place being wholly useless. It is 
this mode of taxation of the poor by the rich which is 
referred to in the text (page 29), in comparing the 
modern acquisitive power of capital with that of 
the lance and sword ; the only difference being 
that the levy of blackmail in old times w^as 
by force, and is now by cozening. The old 
rider and reiver frankly quartered himself on the 
publican for the night; the modern one merely 
makes his lance into an iron spike, and persuades 
his host to buy it. One comes as an open robber, 
the other as a cheating peddler ; but the result, to 
the injured person's pocket, is absolutely the same. 



PREFACE, \x 

Of course many useful industries mingle with, and 
disguise the useless ones ; and in the habits of en- 
ergy aroused by the struggle, there is a certain di- 
rect good. It is far better to spend four thousand 
pounds in making a good gun, and then to blow 
it to pieces, than to pass life in idleness. Only do 
not let it be called "political economy." There is 
also a confused notion in the minds of many per- 
sons, that the gathering of the property of the 
poor into the hands of the rich does no ultimate 
harm; since, in whosesoever hands it may be, it 
must be spent at last, and thus, they think, return 
to the poor again. This fallacy has been again 
and again exposed ; but grant the plea true, and 
the same apology may, of course, be made for 
black mail, or any other form of robbery. It might 
be (though practically it never is) as advantageous 
for the nation that the robber should have the 
spending of the money he extorts, as that the per- 
son robbed should have spent it. But this is no 
excuse for the theft. If I were to put a turnpike 
on the road where it passes my own gate, and en- 
deavor to exact a shilling from every passenger, the 
public would soon do away with my gate, without 
listening to any plea on my part that "it was as 
advantageous to them, in the end, that I should 
spend their shillings, as that they themselves should." 
T3ut if, instead of out-facing them with a turnpike 



X PREFACE, 

I can only persuade them to come in and buy 
stones, or old iron, or any other useless thing, out 
of my ground, I may rob them to the same extent 
and be, moreover, thanked as a public benefactor, 
and promoter of commercial prosperity. And this 
main question for the poor of England — for the 
poor of all countries — is wholly omitted in every 
common treatise on the subject of wealth. Even 
by the laborers themselves, the operation of capital 
is regarded only in its effect on their immediate 
interests; never in the far more terrific power of 
its appointment of the kind and the object of 
labor. It matters little, ultimately, how much a la- 
borer is paid for making anything; but it matters 
fearfully what the thing is, which he is compelled 
to make. If his labor is so ordered as to pro- 
duce food, and fresh air, and fresh water, no mat- 
ter that his wages are low — the food and fresh 
air and water will be at last there; and he will 
at last get them. But if he is paid to destroy 
food and fresh air, or to produce iron bars instead 
of them — the food and air will finally not be there, 
and he will not get tliem, to his great and final 
inconvenience. So that, conclusively, in political as 
in household economy, the great question is, not 
so much what money you have in your pocket, as 
what you will buy with it, and do with it. 
I have been long accustomed, as all men engaged 



PREFACE, 



Zl 



in work of investigation must be, to hear my state- 
ments laughed at for years, before they are examined 
or believed ; and I am generally content to wait the 
public's time. But it has not been without displeased 
surprise that I have found myself totally unable, as 
yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to force this 
plain thought inio my readers' heads — that the wealth 
of nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in 
ciphers; and that the real good of all work, and of 
all commerce, depends on the final worth of the thing 
you make, or get by it. This is a practical enough 
statement, one would think: but the English public 
has been so possessed by its modern school of econo- 
mists with the notion that Business is always good, 
whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit; and 
that buying and selling are always salutary, what- 
ever the intrinsic worth of what you buy or sell- 
that it seems impossible to gain so much as a patient 
hearing for any inquiry respecting the substantial 
result of our eager modern labors. I have never felt 
more checked by the sense of this impossibility than 
in arranging the heads of the following three lect- 
ures, which, though delivered at considerable inter- 
vals of time, and in different places, were not pre- 
pared without reference to each other. Their con- 
nection would, however, have been made far more 
distinct, if I had not been prevented, by what I feel 
to be another great difficulty in addressing English 



Xii PREFACE, 

audiences, from enforcing, with any decision, the 
common, and to me the most important, part of their 
subjects. I chiefly desired (as I have just said) to 
question my hearers — operatives, merchants, and 
soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the "business 
they had in hand; and to know from them what 
they expected or intended their manufacture to come 
to, their selling to come to, and their killing to come 
to. That appeared the first point needing determina- 
tion before I could speak to them with any real utility 
or effect. "You craftsmen — salesmen — swordsmen — 
do but tell me clearly what you want, then, if 1 
can say anything to help you, I will; and if not, 1 
will account to you as I best may for my inability." 
But in order to put this question into any terms, 
one had first of all to face the difficulty just spoken 
of — to me for the present insuperable — the difficulty 
of knowing whether to address one's audience as be- 
lieving, or not believing, in an}'' other world than 
this. For if you address any average modern English 
company as believing in an Eternal life, and endeavor 
to draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as 
to their present business, they will forthwith tell 
you that what you say is very beautiful, but it is not 
practical. If, on the contrary, you frankly address 
them as unbelievers in Eternal life, and tr}^ to draw 
any consequences from that unbelief — they immedi 
ately hold you for an accursed person, and shake oflf 



PREFACE, 



xiu 



the dust from their feet at you. And the more I 
thought over what I had got to say, the less I found I 
could say it, without some reference to this intangible 
or intractable part of the subject. It made all the 
difference, in asserting any principle of war, whether 
one assumed that a discharge of artillery would 
merely knead down a certain quantity of red clay into 
a level line, as in a brick field ; or whether, out of 
every separately Christian-named portion of the ruin- 
ous heap, there went out, into the smoke and dead- 
fallen air of battle, some astonished condition of soul, 
unwillingly released. It made all the difference, in 
speaking of the possible range of commerce, whether 
one assumed that all bargains related only to vis- 
ible property — or whether property, for the present 
invisible, but nevertheless real, was elsewhere pur- 
chasable on other terms. It made all the difference 
in addressing a body of men subject to considerable 
hardship, and having to find some way out of it — 
whether one could confidently say to them, "My 
friends — ^you have only to die, and all will be right ; '' 
or whether one had any secret misgiving that such 
advice was more blessed to him that gave, than to 
him that took it. And therefore the deliberate reader 
will find throughout these lectures, a hesitation in 
driving points home, and a pausing short of conclu- 
sions which he will feel I would fain have come 
to; hesitation which arises wholly from this uncer- 



jjy PREFA.(jE, 



tainty of my hearers' temper. For I do not now 
speak, nor have I ever spoken, since the time of first 
forward youth, in any proselyting temper, as desiring 
to persuade any one of what, in such matters, I 
thought myself; but, whomsoever I venture to ad- 
dress, I take for the time his creed as I find it, and 
endeavor to push it into such vital fruit as it seems 
capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a great part of 
the existing English people, that they are in possession 
of a book which tells them, straight from the lips of 
God all they ought to do, and need to know. I have 
read that book, with as much care as most of them, 
for some forty years ; and am thankful that, on those 
who trust it, I can press its pleadings. My endeavor 
has been uniformly to make them trust it more deeply 
than they do; trust it, not in their own favorite 
verses only, but in the sum of all ; trust it not as a 
fetich or talisman, which they are to be saved by daily 
repetitions of ; but as a Captain's order, to be heard 
and obeyed at their peril. I was always encouraged 
by supposing my hearers to hold such belief. To 
these, if to any, I once had hope of addressing, with 
acceptance, words which insisted on the guilt of pride, 
and the futility of avarice ; from these, if from any, 
I once expected ratification of a political economy, 
Avhich asserted that the life was more than the meat, 
and the body than raiment; and these, it once 
seemed to me, I might ask, without accusation of 



I 



PREFACE. 



XV 



fanaticism, not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in 
the bestowal of their heart's treasure, to separate 
themselves from the crowd of whom it is written, 
" After all these things do the Gentiles seek." 

It cannot, however, be assumed, with any semblance 
of reason, that a general audience is now wholly, or 
even in majority composed of these religious persons. 
A large portion must always consist of men who 
admit no such creed; or who, at least, are inacces- 
sible to appeals founded on it. And as, with the so- 
called Christian, I desired to plead for honest declara- 
tion and fulfillment of his belief in life — with the so- 
called Infidel, I desired to plead for an honest declara- 
tion and fulfillment of his belief in death. The di- 
lemma is inevitable. Men must either hereafter live, 
or hereafter die; fate may be bravely met, and con- 
duct wisely ordered, on either expectation ; but never 
in hesitation between ungrasped hope, and uncon- 
fronted fear. We usually believe in immortality, so 
far as to avoid preparation for death; and in mor- 
tality, so far as to avoid preparation for anything after 
death. Whereas, a wise man w411 at least hold him- 
self prepared for one or other of two events, of which 
one or other is inevitable ; and will have all things in 
order, for his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening. 

]^or have we any right to call it an ignoble judg- 
ment, if he determine to put them in order, as for 
sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable 



xvi PREFACE. 

state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual 
one. I know few Christians so convinced of the 
splendor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to 
be happier when their friends are called to those 
mansions, than they would have been if the Queen 
had sent for them to live at court : nor has the 
Church's most ardent "desire to depart, and be with 
Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of put- 
ting on mourning for every person summoned to such 
departure. On the contrary, a brave belief in death 
has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons, 
and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church 
itself, when it assumes that such a belief is incon- 
sistent with either purity of character, or energy of 
hand. The shortness of life is not, to any rational 
person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space 
of it which may be granted him; nor does the 
anticipation of death to-morrow suggest, to any 
one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunken- 
ness today. To teach that there is no device 
in the grave, may indeed make the deviceless 
person more contented in his dullness; but it 
will make the deviser only more earnest in de- 
vising ; nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be 
purer under the conviction that all its evil may in 
a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in 
a moment redeemed; and that the sigh of repent- 
ance, which purges the guilt of the past, will waft 



PREFACE, xvii 

the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain — 
than it may be under the sterner, and to many 
not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that 
" what a man soweth that shall he also reap '^ — or 
others reap — when he, the living seed of pestilence, 
walketh no more in darkness, but lies down there- 
in. 

But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bitter 
ness of soul, or the offense given by the conduct 
of those who claim higher hope, may have ren- 
dered this painful creed the only possible one, 
there is an appeal to be made, more secure in its 
ground than any which can be addressed to happier 
persons. I would fain, if I might offenselessly, have 
spoken to them as if none others heard ; and have said 
thus : Hear me, you dying men, who will soon be 
deaf forever. For these others, at your right hand 
and your left, who look forward to a state of in- 
finite existence, in which all their errors will be 
overruled, and all their faults forgiven; for these, 
who, stained and blackened in the battle smoke of 
mortality, have but to dip themselves for an instant 
in the font of death, and to rise renewed of plu- 
mage, as a dove that is covered with silver, and 
her feathers like gold ; for these, indeed, it may be 
permissible to waste their numbered moments, through 
faith in a future of innumerable hours ; to these, 
in their weakness, it may be conceded that they 



xviii FREPACBi. 

should tamper with sin which can only bring forth 
fruit of righteousness, and profit by the iniquity 
which, one day, will be remembered no more. In 
them, it may be no sign of hardness of heart to 
neglect the poor, over whom they know their 
Master is watching; and to leave those to perish 
temporarily who cannot perish eternally. But, for 
you, there is no such hope, and therefore no such 
excuse. This fate, which you ordain for the 
wretched, you believe to be all their inheritance ; 
you may crush them, before the moth, and they 
will never rise to rebuke you — their breath, 
which fails for lack of food, once expiring, will 
never be recalled to whisper against you a word 
of accusing — they and you, as you think, shall lie 
down together in the dust, and the worms cover 
you — and for them there shall be no consolation, 
and on you no vengeance — only the question mur- 
mured above your grave : " Who shall repay him 
what he hath done?" Is it therefore easier for you 
in your heart to inflict the sorrow for which there 
is no remedy ? Will you take, wantonly, this little all 
of his life from your poor brother, and make his brief 
hours long to him with pain ? Will you be readier to 
the injustice which can never be redressed ; and nig- 
gardly of mercy which you can bestow but once, and 
which, refusing, you refuse forever ? I think better of 
you, even of the most selfish, than that you would do 



PREFACE. xix 

this, well understood. And for yourselves, it seems to 
me, the question becomes not less grave, in these curt 
limits. If your life were but a fever fit — the madness 
of a night, whose follies were all to be forgotten in the 
dawn, it might matter little how you fretted away the 
sickly hours — what toys you snatched at, or let fall — • 
what visions you followed wistfully with the deceived 
eyes of sleepless frenzy. Is the earth only an hos- 
pital ? Play, if you care to play, on the floor of the 
hospital dens. Knit its straw into what crowns 
please you ; gather the dust of it for treasure, and die 
rich in that, clutching at the black motes in the air 
with your dying hands — and yet, it may be well with 
you. But if this life be no dream, and the world no 
hospital; if all the peace and power and joy you 
can ever win, must be won now; and all fruit of vic- 
tory gathered here, or never — will you still, 
throughout the puny totality of your life, weary 
yourselves in the fire of vanity 'i If there is no rest 
which remaineth for you, is there none you might 
presently take? was this grass of the earth made 
green for your shroud only, not for your bed ? and 
can you never lie down upon it, but only under it? 
The heathen, to whose creed you have returned, 
thought not so. They knew that life brought its 
contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all 
contest. No proud one ! no jeweled circlet flaming 
through Heaven above the height of the unmerited 



tfirotie, only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the 
tired brow, through a few years of peace. It should 
have been of gold, they thought ; but Jupiter was 
poor; this was the best the god could give them. 
Seeking a greater than this, they had known it a 
mockery, l^ot in war, not in wealth, not in 
tyranny, was there any happiness to be found 
for them — only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. 
The wreath was to be of wild olive, mark you — 
the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks 
with no vivid bloom, no verdure of branch; only 
with soft snow of blossom, and scarcely fulfilled 
fruit, mixed with gray leaf and thorn-set stem ; no 
fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp em- 
broidery ! But this, such as it is, you may win while 
yet you live; type of gray honor and sweet rest. 
Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed 
trust and requited love, and the sight of the peace of 
others, and the ministry to their pain — these, and the 
blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers 
of the earth beneath ; and mysteries and presences, 
innumerable, of living things — these may yet be here 
your riches ; un tormenting and divine : serviceable 
for the life that now is ; nor, it may be, without 
promise of that which is to come. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

THREE LEOTUltES. 

1. WORK. 

2. TRAFBIO. 
& WAR. 



LEOTURE I. 

WORK. 

(Delivered before the Working Men^s Institute, at CarriberweU.) 

My Fkiends — I have not come among you to-night 
to endeavor to give you an entertaining lecture ; but 
to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you some plain, 
but necessary questions. I have seen and known too 
much of the struggle for life among our laboring popu- 
lation, to feel at ease, even under any circumstances, in 
inviting them to dwell on the trivialities of my own 
studies ; but, much more, as I meet to-night, for the 
first time, the members of a working Institute estab- 
lished in the district in which I have passed the greater 
part of my life, I am desirous that we should at once 
understand each other, on graver matters. I would 
fain tell you, with what feelings, and with what hope, 
I regard this Institution, as one of many such, now 
happily established throughout England, as well as 
in other countries — Institutions which are preparing 
the way for a great change m ail the circumstances 



•3 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

of industrial life; but of which the success must 
wholly depend upon our clearly understanding the cir- 
cumstances and necessary limits of this change. No 
teacher can truly promote the cause of education 
until he knows the conditions of the life for which 
that education is to prepare his pupil. And the fact 
that he is called upon to address you, nominally, as a 
" Working Class," must compel him, if he is in any 
wise earnest or thoughtful, to inquire in the outset, on 
what you yourselves suppose this class distinction has 
been founded in the past, and must be founded in the 
future. The manner of the amusement, and the 
matter of the teaching, which any of us can offer you, 
must depend wholly on our first understanding from 
you, whether you think the distinction heretofore 
drawn between workingmen and others, is truly or 
falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands? do 
you wish it to be modified? or do you think the 
object of education is to efface it, and make us forget 
it forever? 

Let me make myself more distinctly understood. 
We call this — you and I — a "Working Men's" In- 
stitute, and our college in London, a "Working 
Men's" College. Kow, how do you consider that 
these several institutes differ, or ought to differ, from 
"idle men's" institutes and "idle men's" colleges? 
Or by what other word than "idle" shall I distin- 
guish those whom the happiest and wisest of working- 



WORK, 3 

men do not object to call the " Upper Classes ? " Are 
there really upper classes — are there lower? How 
much should they always be elevated, how much al- 
ways depressed ? And, gentlemen and ladies — I pray 
those of you who are here to forgive me the offense 
there may be in what I am going to say. It is not 7 
who wish to say it. Bitter voices say it ; voices of bat- 
tle and of famine through all the world, which must 
be heard some day, whoever keeps silence. Neither is 
it to you specially that I say it. I am sure that most 
now present know their duties of kindness, and fulfill 
them, better perhaps than I do mine. But I speak to 
you as representing your whole class, which errs, I 
know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore the 
less terribly. Willful error is limited by the will, but 
what limit is there to that of which we are uncon- 
scious ? 

Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these work- 
men, and ask them, also as representing a great multi- 
tude, what they think the " upper classes " are, and 
ought to be, in relation to them. Answer, you work- 
men who are here, as you would among yourselves, 
frankly; and tell me how you would have me call 
those classes. Am I to call them — would you think 
me right in calling them — the idle classes? I think 
you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as if I were not 
treating my subject honestly, or speaking from my 
heart, if I went on under the supposition that all rich 



4 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

people were idle. You would be both unjust and un- 
wise if you would allow me to say that — not less un- 
just than the rich people who say that all the poor are 
idle, and will never work if they can help it, or more 
than they can help. 

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and 
idle rich ; and there are busy poor and busy rich. 
Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a 
year ; and many a man of large fortune is busier than 
his errand-boy, and never would think of stopping in 
the street to play marbles. So that, in a large view, 
the distinction between workers and idlers, as between 
knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart 
and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in 
all positions. There is ^ working class — strong and 
happy — among both rich and poor; there is an idle 
class — weak, wicked and miserable — among both rich 
and poor. And the worst of the misunderstandings 
arising between the two orders come of the unlucky 
fact that the wise of one class habitually contem- 
plate the foolish of the other. If the busy rich 
people watched and rebuked the idle rich people, all 
would be right ; and if the busy poor people watched 
and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right. 
But each class has a tendency to look for the faults 
of the other. A hard-working man of property is 
particularly offended by an idle beggar; but an 
orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant of 



WOBK, 5 

the licentious luxury of the rich. And what is severe 
judgment in the minds of the just men of either class, 
becomes fierce enmity in the unjust — but among the 
unjust onl]/. N'one but the dissolute among the poor 
look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire 
to pillage their houses and divide their property. 
None but the dissolute among the rich speak in 
opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the 
poor. 

There is, then, no class distinction between idle and 
industrious people ; and I am going to-night to speak 
only of the industrious. The idle people we will put 
out of our thoughts at once — they are mere nuisances 
— what ought to be done with the7n, we'll talk of at 
another time. But there are class distinctions among 
the industrious themselves — tremendous distinctions, 
which rise and fall to every degree in the infinite ther- 
mometer of human pain and of human power — distinc- 
tions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole 
reach of man's soul and body. 

These separations we will study, and the laws of 
them, among energetic men only, who, whether they 
work or whether they play, put their strength into 
the work, and their strength into the game ; being in 
the full sense of the word " industrious," one way or 
another — with a purpose, or without. And these dis- 
tinctions are mainly four: 

I. Between those who work, and those who play. 



6 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

II. Between those who produce the means of life, 
and those who consume them 

III. Between those who work with the head, and 
those who work with the hand. 

lY. Between those who work wisely, and who work 
foolishly. 

For easier memory, let us say we are going to op- 
pose, in our examination : 

I. Work to play ; 
II. Production to consumption ; 
III. Head to hand ; and, 
lY. Sense to nonsense. 

I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes 
who work and the classes who play. Of course we 
must agree upon a definition of these terms — work 
and play — before going further. IS'ow, roughly, not 
with vain subtlety of definition, but for plain use of 
the words, "pla^^" is an exertion of body or mind, 
made to please ourselves, and with no determined end ; 
and work is a thing done because it ought to be done, 
and with a determined end. You play, as you call it, 
at cricket, for instance. This is as hard work as any- 
thing else ; but it amuses you, and it has no result but 
the amusement. If it were done as an ordered form 
of exercise, for health's sake, it would become work 
directly. So, in like manner, whatever we do to please 
ourselves, and only for the sake of the pleasure, not for 
an ultimate object, is ''play," the "pleasing thing," 



not the useful thing. Play may be useful in a second- 
ary sense (nothing is indeed more useful or necessary); 
but the use of it depends on its being spontaneous. 

Let us, then, inquire together what sort of games 
the playing class in England spend their lives in 
playing at. 

The first of all English games is making money. 
That is an all-absorbing game; and we knock each 
other down oftener in pla3dng at that than at foot- 
ball, or any other roughest sport ; and it is abso- 
lutely without purpose; no one who engages heartily 
in that game ever knows why. Ask a great money- 
maker what he wants to do with his money — he 
never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything 
with it. He gets it only that he may get it. " What 
will you make of what you have got?" you ask. 
"Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as, at cricket, 
you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but 
to get more of them than other people is the game. 
And there's no use in the money, but to have more 
of it than other people is the game. So all that 
great foul city of London there — rattling, growling, 
smoking, stinking — a ghastly heap of fermenting 
brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore — you 
fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It 
is a great city of play; very nasty play, and very 
hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's cricket 
ground without the turf — a huge billiard-table witli- 



8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

out the cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bot- 
tomless pit; but mainly a billiard-table, after all. 

Well, the first great English game is this playing 
at counters. It differs from the rest in that it ap- 
pears always to be producing money, while every 
other game is expensive. But it does not always 
produce money. There's a great difference between 
"winning" money and "making" it; a great differ- 
ence between getting it out of another man's pocket 
into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no 
means the same thing as making it ; the tax-gatherer's 
house is not the Mint; and much of the apparent 
gain (so-called), in commerce, is only a form of tax- 
ation on carriage or exchange. 

Our next great English game, however, hunting 
and shooting, is costly altogether ; and how much 
we are fined for it annually in land, horses, game- 
keepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies 
that beautiful and special English game, I will not 
endeavor to count now : but note only that, except 
for exercise, this is not merely a useless game, but a 
deadly one, to all connected with it. For through 
horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher 
classes everywhere call "Play," in distinction from 
all other plays; that is — gambling; by no means a 
beneficial or recreative game: and, through game- 
preserving, you get also some curious laying out of 
ground; that beautiful arrangement of dwelling-house 



WOBK. y 

for man and beast, by which we have grouse and 
blackcock — so many brace to the acre, and men and 
women — so many brace to the garret. I often wonder 
what the angehc builders and surveyors — the angelic 
builders who build the " many mansions " up above 
there ; and the angelic surveyors, who measured that 
four-square city with their measuring reeds — I wonder 
what they think, or are supposed to think, of the 
laying out of ground by this nation, which has set 
itself, as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for 
word, or rather fact for word, in the persons of those 
poor whom its Master left to represent him, what that 
Master said of himself — that foxes and birds had 
homes, but He none. 

Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we 
must put the ladies' game of dressing. It is not the 
cheapest of games. I saw a brooch at a jeweler's in 
Bond Street a fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and 
without any singular jewel in it, yet worth £3,000. 
And I wish I could tell you what this " play " costs^ 
altogether, in England, France, and Eussia annually. 
But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, I like it ; 
nay, I don't see it played quite as much as I would fain 
have it. You ladies like to lead the fashion — by all 
means lead it — lead it thoroughly, lead it far enough. 
Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else 
nicely. Lead the fashions for the poor first ; make 
them look well, and you yourselves will look, in waj^s 



10 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

of which you have no conception, all the better. The 
fashions you have set for some time among your peas- 
antry are not pretty ones ; their doublets are too irreg- 
ularly slashed, and the wind blows too f ranldy through 
them. 

Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could 
show you if I had time. 

There's playing at literature, and playing at art — 
very different, both, from working at literature, or 
working at art, but I've no time to speak of these. I 
pass to the greatest of all — the play of plays, the great 
gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best to play 
at — the game of War. It is entrancingly pleasant to 
the imagination ; the facts of it, not always so pleasant. 
We dress for it, however, more finely than for any 
other sport ; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, as 
to hunt, but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine 
colors : of course we could fight better in gray, and 
without feathers ; but all nations have agreed that it is 
good to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats 
and balls are very costly ; our English and French bat?^ 
with the balls and wickets, even those which we don't 
make use of, costing, I suppose, now about fifteen mill- 
ions of money annually to each nation ; all of which 
you know is paid for by hard laborer's work in the fur- 
row and furnace. A costly game ! — not to speak of its 
consequences ; I will say at present nothing of these. 
The mere immediate cost of all these plays is Avhat I 



WOEK. 11 

want you to consider ; they all cost deadly work some- 
where, as many of us know too well. The jewel- 
cutter, whose sight fails over the diamonds ; the 
weaver, whose arms fails over the web; the iron- 
forger, whose breath fails before the furnace — they 
know what work is — they, who have all the work and 
none of the play, except a kind they have named for 
themselves down in the black north country, whert 
^'play" means being laid up by sickness. It is a 
pretty example for philologists, of varying dialect, this 
change in the sense of the word " play," as used in the 
black country of Birmingham, and the red-and-black 
country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentle- 
women, of England, who think ''one moment un- 
amused a misery, not made for feeble man," this is 
what you have brought the word " play " to mean, in the 
heart of merry England ! You may have your fluting 
and piping ; but there are sad children sitting in tK. 
market-place, who indeed cannot say to you, " We have 
piped unto you, and ye have not danced : " but eter- 
nally shall say to you, "We have mourned unto you, 
and ye have not lamented." 

This, then, is the first distinction between the 
" upper and lower " classes. And this is one which is 
by no means necessary ; which indeed must, in process 
of good time, be by all honest men's consent abolished. 
Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained 
by the blood of other creatures, is a good existenct;) 



12 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVK 

for gnatsi and sucking fish; but not for men: that 
neither days, nor hves, can be made holy by doing 
nothing in them : that the best prayer at the begin- 
ning of a day is that we may not lose its moments ; 
and the best grace before meat, the consciousness that 
we have justly earned our dinner. And when we 
have this much of plain Christianity preached to us 
again, and enough respect what we regard as inspira- 
tion, as not to think that " Son, go work to-day in 
my vineyard," means "Fool, go play to-day in my 
vineyard," we shall all be workers, in one way or 
another; and this much at least of the distinction 
between " upper " and " lower " forgotten. 

II. I pass then to our second distinction ; between 
the rich and poor^ between Dives and Lazarus — dis- 
tinction which exists more sternly, I suppose, in this 
day, than ever in the world. Pagan or Christian, till 
now. I will put it sharply before you, to begin with, 
merely by reading two paragraphs which I cut from 
two papers that lay on my breakfast-table on the 
same morning, the 25th of E'ovember, 1864. The 
piece about the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace 
enough, and stupid besides (for fifteen francs — 12^. 6d. 
— is nothing for a rich man to give for a couple of 
peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs 
printed on the same day are worth putting side by 
side. 

*'Such a man is now here. He is a Eussian, and^ 



WORK 13 

with jour permission, we will call him Count Teufel- 
skine. In dress he is sublime ; art is considered in 
that toilet, the harmony of color respected, the chiaro- 
oscuro evident in well-selected contrast. In manners 
he is dignified — nay, perhaps apathetic ; nothing dis- 
turbs the placid serenity of that calm exterior. One 
day our friend breakfasted che^ Bignon. When the 
bill came he read, 'Two peaches, 15f.' He paid. 
'Peaches scarce, I presume?' was his sole remark. 
'Iso, sir,' replied the waiter, 'but Teufelskines are.'" 
Telegraph, November 25, 1864. 

"Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, 
passing a dung heap in the stone-yard near the re- 
cently-erected almshouses in Shadwell Gap, High street, 
Shadwell, called the attention of a Thames police-con- 
stable to a man in a sitting position on the dung heap, 
and said she was afraid he was dead. Her fears 
proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared 
to have been dead several hours. He had perishgd of 
cold and wet, and the rain had been beating down on 
him all night. The deceased was a bone-picker. He 
was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and 
half -starved. The police had frequently driven him 
away from the stone-yard, between sunset and sunrise, 
and told him to go home. He selected a most desolate 
spot for his wretched death. A penny and some bones 
were found in his pockets. The deceased was between 
fifty and sixty years of age. Inspector Eoberts, of 



14 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the K division, has given directions for inquiries to be 
made at the lodging-houses respecting the deceased, to 
ascertain his identity, if possible." — Morning Post^ 
November 25, 1864. 

You have the separation thus in brief compass ; and 
I want you to take notice of the " a penny and some 
bones were found in his pockets," and to compare it 
with this third statement, from the Telegraph of Janu- 
ary 16th of this year : 

"Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile 
paupers was drawn up by the most conspicuous polit- 
ical economists in England. It is low in quantity, but 
it is sufficient to support nature ; yet within ten years 
of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the 
paupers in the Andover Union gnawing the scraps of 
putrid flesh and sucking the marrow from the bones 
of horses which the}^ were employed to crush." 

You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of 
Christianity has some advantage over the Jewish one. 
Jewish Lazarus expected, or at least prayed, to be fed 
with crumbs from the rich man's table ; but our Laza- 
rus is fed with crumbs from the dog's table. 

Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on 
two bases. Within its proper limits, on a basis which 
is lawful and everlastingly necessary ; beyond them, 
on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly corrupting the 
frame-work of society. The lawful basis of wealth is, 
that a man who works should he paid the fair value of 



WORK. 15 

his work ; and that if he does not choose to spend it 
to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, and spend 
it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working 
daily, and laying by daily, attains at last the posses- 
sion of an accumulated sum of wealth, to which he 
has absolute right. The idle person who will not 
work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, 
at the end of the same time will be doubly poor — poor 
in possession, and dissolute in moral habit ; and he will 
then naturally covet the money which the other has 
saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, 
and rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no 
more any motive for saving, or any reward for good 
conduct; and all society is thereupon dissolved, or 
exists only in systems of rapine. Therefore the first 
necessity of social life is the clearness of national con- 
science in enforcing the law — that he should keep who 

has JUSTLY EAENED. 

That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction 
between rich and poor. But there is also a false 
basis of distinction ; namely, the power held over those 
who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it. There 
will be always a number of men who would fain set 
themselves to the accumulation of wealth as the sole 
object of their lives. J^ecessarily, that class of men 
is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, and more 
or less cowardly. It is physically impossible for a 
well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make 



16 THE CRu iVJSr OF WILD OLIVE. 

money the chief object of his thoughts ; as physically 
impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the 
prmcipal object of them. All healthy people like 
their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object 
of their lives. So all healthilj^ minded people like 
making money — ought to like it, and to enjoy the 
sensation of winning it ; but the main object of their 
life is not money ; it is something better than money. 
A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his 
fighting well. He is glad of his pay — very properly 
so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten years 
without it — still, his main notion of life is to win 
battles, not to be paid for winning them. So of 
clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, 
of course; but yet, if they are brave and well edu- 
cated, the pew-rent is not the sole object of their 
lives, and the baptismal fee is not the sole purpose of 
the baptism; the clergyman's object is essentially to 
baptize and preach, not to be paid for preaching. So 
of doctors. They like fees no doubt — ought to like 
them ; yet if they are brave and well educated, the 
entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the 
whole, desire to cure the sick ; and — if they are good 
doctors, and the choice were fairly put to them — 
would rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, 
than kill him, and get it. And so with all other 
brave and rightly trained men ; their work is first, 
their fee second — very important always, but still 



WOBK. 17 

second. But in every nation, as I said, there are a vast 
class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less 
stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the 
fee is first, and the work second, as with brave people 
the work is first and the fee second. And this is no 
small distinction. It is the whole distinction in a man ; 
distinction between life and death in him, between 
heaven and hell /or him. You cannot serve two mas- 
ters — you ?nt(.st serve one or other. If your work is 
first with you, and your fee second, work is your mas- 
ter, and the lord of work, who is God. But if your fee 
is first with you, and your work second, fee is your 
master, and the lord of fee, who is the Devil ; and not 
only the Devil, but the lowest of devils — the " least 
erected fiend that fell." So there you have it in brief 
terms ; Work first — you are God's servants ; Fee first 
— ^you are the Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now 
and ever, believe me, whether you serve Him who has* 
on His vesture and thigh written, '' King of Kings," 
and whose service is perfect freedom ; or him on whose 
vesture and thigh the name is written, "Slave of 
Slaves," and whose service is perfect slavery. 

However, in every nation there are, and must 
always be a certain number of these Fiend's servants, 
who have it principally for the object of their lives to 
make money. The}^ are always, as I said, more or less 
stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as 
money. Stupidity is always the basis of the Judas 



18 TBE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

bargain. We do great injustice to Iscariot, in think- 
ing him wicked above all common wickedness. He 
was only a common money-lover, and, like all money - 
lovers, didn't understand Christ — couldn't make out 
the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He didn't 
want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck when 
he found that Christ would be killed ; threw his money 
away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of 
our present mone3^-seekers, think you, would have the 
grace to hang themselves, whoever w^as killed ? But 
Judas was a common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering 
fellow; his hand always in the bag of the poor, not 
caring for them. He didn't understand Christ — yet 
believed in Him, much more than most of us do ; had 
seen Him do miracles, thought He was quite strong 
enough to shift for Himself, and he, Judas, might as 
well make his own little by-perquisites out of the 
affair. Christ would come out of it well enough, and 
he have his thirty pieces. Now, that is the money- 
seeker's idea, all over the world. He doesn't hate 
Christ, but can't understand Him — doesn't care for 
Him — sees no good in that benevolent business ; makes 
his own little job out of it at all events, come what 
will. And thus, out of every mass of men, you have 
a certain number of bag-men — your " fee-first " men, 
whose main object is to make money. And they do 
make it — make it in all sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by 
the weight and force of money itself or what is called 



WORK, 19 

the power of capital ; that is to say, the power which 
money, once obtained, has over the labor of the poor, 
so tha.t the capitalist can take all its produce to him- 
self, except the laborer's food. That is the modern 
Judas' way of "carrying the bag," and "bearing what 
is put thereifi." 

Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair ad- 
vantage ? Has not tlf e man who has worked for the 
money a right to use it as he best can ? E"o ; in this 
respect, money is now exactly what mountain prom- 
ontories over public roads were in old times. The 
barons fought for them fairly — the strongest and 
cunningest got them ; then fortified them, and made 
every one who passed below pay toll. "Well, capital 
now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight 
fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, though it is 
more than we ought) for their money ; but, once hav- 
ing got it, the fortified millionaire can make every- 
body who passes below pay toll to his million, and 
build another tower of his money castle. And I can 
tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suifer now 
quite as much from the bag-baron, as ever they did 
from the crag-baron. Bags and crags have just the 
same result on rags.- I have not time, however, to-night 
to show you in how many ways the power of capital 
is unjust ; but this one great principle I have to assert 
' — ^you will find it quite indisputably true — that when- 
ever money is the principal object of life with either 



20 THE (JROWN OF WILD OLIYK 

man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and 
does harm both in the getting and spending ; but when 
it is not the principal object, it and all other things 
will be well got, and well spent. And here is the test, 
with every man, of whether money is the principal ob- 
ject with him, or not. If in mid-life he could pause 
and say, " JSTow I have enough to live upon, I'll live 
upon it ; and having well earned it, I will also well 
spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into 
it," then money is not principal with him ; but if, hav- 
ing enough to live upon in the manner befitting his 
character and rank, he still wants to make more, and 
to die rich, then money is the principal object with 
him, and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally 
to those who spend it after him. For you -mow it 
must be spent some day ; the only question is Avhether 
the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. 
And generally it is better for the maker to 3pend it, 
for he will know best its value and use. This is the 
true law of life. And if a man does not choose thus 
to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, 
and the worst thing he can generally do is to lend, it ; 
for borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is 
with lent money that all evil is mainly done, and all 
unjust war protracted. 

For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans 
to foreign military governments, and how strange it is. 
If your little boy came to vou to ask for money to 



WOBK. 21 

Spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice 
before you gave it to him, and you would have some 
idea that it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fire- 
works, even though he did no mischief with it. But 
the Eussian children, and Austrian children, come to 
you, borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, 
but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India 
with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, 
and to murder Polish women and children with; 
and that you will give at once, because they pay you 
interest for it. ^N'ow, in order to pay you that inter- 
est, they must tax every working peasant in their 
dominions : and on that work you live. You therefore 
at once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish 
the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the 
theft, and the bribe for the assassination ! That is the 
broad fact — that is the practical meaning of your for- 
eign loans, and of most large interest of money ; and 
then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth, as if 
he denied the Bible, and you believed it! though, 
wretches as you are, every deliberate act of your lives 
is a new defiance of its primary orders ; and as if, for 
most of the rich men of England at this moment, it 
were not indeed to be desired, as the best thing at 
least for them, that the Bible should not be true, since 
against them these words are written in it : " The rust 
of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, 
and shall ea(; your flesh, as it were fire." 



22 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

III. I pass now to our third condition of separation, 
between the men who work with the hand, and those 
who work with the head. 

And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. 
There Tmist be work done by the arms, or none of us 
could live. There must be work done by the brains, 
or the life we get would not be worth having. And 
the same men cannot do both. There is rough work 
to be done, and rough men must do it ; there is gentle 
work to be done, and gentlemen must do it ; and it is 
physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, 
the work of the other. And it is of no use to try tc 
conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk 
to the workman about the honorableness of manual 
labor, and the dignity of humanity. That is a grand 
old proverb of Sancho Panza's, " Fine words butter nc 
parsnips ;" and I can tell you that, all over England 
just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too 
much butter at that dairy. Eough work, honorable or 
not, takes the life out of us ; and the man who has 
been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an 
express train against the north wind all night, or hold- 
ing a colher's helm in a gale .on a lee-shore, or whirling 
white-hot iron at a furnace mouth, that man is not the 
same at the end of his day, or night, as one who has 
been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfort- 
able about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, 
or painting pictures. If it is any comfort to you to be 



WOEK. 23 

told that the rough work is the more honorable of the 
two, I should be sorry to take that much of consolation 
from you ; and in some sense I need not. The rough 
work is at all events real, honest, and generally, 
though not always, useful; while the fine work is, a 
great deal of it, foolish and false as well as fine, and 
therefore dishonorable: but when both kinds are 
equally well and worthily done, the head's is the noble 
work, and the hand's the ignoble; and of all hand 
work whatsoever, necessary for the maintenance of 
life, those old words, "In the sweat of thy face thou 
shalt eat bread," indicate that the inherent nature of 
it is one of calamity ; and that the ground, cursed for 
our sake, casts also some shadow of degradation into 
our contest with its thorn and its thistle ; so that all 
nations have held their days honorable, or " holy," and 
constituted them " holydays " or " holidays," by mak- 
ing them days of rest ; and the promise, which, among 
all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief brightness 
over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the 
Lord, that ''they rest from their labors, and their 
works do follow them." 

And thus the perpetual question and contest must 
arise, who is to do this rough work? and how is the 
worker of it to be comforted, redeemed, and rewarded ? 
and what kind of play should he have, and what rest, 
in this world, sometimes, as well as in the next? 
Well, my good working friends, these questions will 



24 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

take a little time to answer yet. They must be 
answered : all good men are occupied with them, and 
all honest thinkers. There's grand head-work doing 
about them ; but much must be discovered, and much 
attempted in vain, before anything decisive can be 
told you. Only note these few particulars, which are 
already sure. 

As to the distribution of the hard work. None of 
us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work be- 
cause we think we ought; but because we have 
chanced to fall into the wa}^ of it, and cannot help our- 
selves. ISTow, nobody does anything well that they 
cannot help doing : work is only done well when it is 
done with a will ; and no man has a thoroughly sound 
will unless he knows he is doing what he should, and 
is in his place. And, depend upon it, all work must be 
done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, doggish 
way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way — a law- 
ful way. Men are enlisted for the labor that kills— 
the labor of war: they are counted, trained, fed, 
dressed, and praised for that. Let them be enlisted 
also for the labor that feeds: let them be counted, 
trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plow 
exercise as carefully as you do the sword exercise, and 
let the officers of troops of life be held as much gentle- 
men as the officers of troops of death ; and all is done : 
but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be accom- 
plished — you can't even see your way to it — unless, 



WOMK. 25 

first of ailj both servant and master are resolved that 
come what will of it, they will do each other justice. 
People are perpetually squabbling about what will be 
best to do, or easiest to do, or advisablest to do, or 
profitablest to do ; but they never, so far as I hear 
them talk, ever ask what it is just to do. And it is 
the law of heaven that you shall not be able to judge 
what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to 
judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing 
constantly reiterated by our Master — the order of all 
others that is given oftenest — " Do justice and judg- 
ment." That's your Bible order ; that's the " Service 
of God," not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, 
indeed, to sing psalms when you are merry, and to 
pray when you need anything ; and, by the perversion 
of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying and 
psalm-singing are " service." If a child finds itself in 
want of anything, it runs in and asks its father for it 
— does it call that, doing its father a service ? If it 
begs for a toy or a piece of cake — does it call that 
serving its father? That, with God, is prayer, and He 
likes to hear it : He likes you to ask Him for cake 
when you want it ; but He doesn't call that " serving 
Him." Begging is not serving : God likes mere beg- 
gars as little as you do — He likes honest servants, not 
beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, 
and is very happy, it may sing little songs about him*' 
but it doesn't call that serving its father; neither is 



26 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

singing songs about God, serving God. It -}s enjoying 
ourselves, if it's anything ; most probably it is noth- 
ing ; but if it's anything, it is serving ourselves, not 
God. And yet we are impudent enough to call our 
beggings and chantings "Divine Service:" we say 
"Divine service will be 'performed'" (that's our word 
— the form of it gone through) "at eleven o'clock." 
Alas I — unless we perform Divine service in every will- 
ing act of our life, we never perform it at all. The 
one Divine work — the one ordered sacrifice — is to do 
justice ; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. 
Anything rather than that ! As much charity as you 
choose, but no justice. "[N'ay," you will say, "charity 
IS greater than justice." Yes, it is greater ; it is the 
summit of justice — it is the temple of which justice is 
the foundation. But you can't have the top without 
the bottom; you cannot build upon charity. You 
must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you 
have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the 
last reward of good work. Do justice to your brother 
(you can do that, whether you love him or not), and 
you will come to love him. But do injustice to him, 
because you don't love him ; and you will come to 
hate him. It is all very fine to think you can build upon 
charity to begin with ; but you will find all you have 
got to begin with, begins at home, and is essentially love 
of yourself. You well-to-do people, for instance, who 
are here to-night, will go to "Divine service" ne;^t 



WOBK. 27 

Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little children will 
have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely 
little Sunday feathers in their hats ; and you'll think, 
complacently and piously, how lovely they look ! So 
they do ; and you love them heartily, and you like 
sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right : that 
is charity ; but it is charity beginning at home. Then 
you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got 
up also — it, in its Sunday dress — the dirtiest rags it 
has — that it may beg the better : we shall give it a 
penny, and think how good we are. That's charity 
going abroad. But what does Justice say, walking 
and watching near us ? Christian Justice has been 
strangely mute, and seemingly blind ; and, if not blind, 
decrepit, this many a day : she keeps her accounts 
still, however — quite steadily — doing them at nights, 
carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest 
spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she 
cares about). You must put your ear down ever so 
close to her lips to hear her speak ; and then you will 
start at what she first whispers, for it will certainly 
be, "Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a 
feather on its head, as well as your own child ?" 
Then you may ask Justice, in an amazed manner, 
" How she can possibly be so foolish as to think chil- 
dren could sweep crossings with feathers on their 
heads ?" Then you stoop again, and Justice says — 
still in her dull, stupid way — " Then, why don't you, 



Ji 



28 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep tha 
crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a 
hat and feather?" Mercy on us (you think), what will 
she say next ? And you answer, of course, that " you 
don't, because everybody ought to remain content in 
the position in which Providence has placed them." 
Ah, my friends, that's the gist of the whole question. 
Did Providence put them in that position, or did you f 
You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him 
to remain content in the '' position in which Providence 
has placed him." That's modern Christianity. You 
say — " We did not knock him into the ditch." How 
do you know what you have done, or are doing? 
That's just what we have all got to know, and what 
we shall never know, until the question with us every 
morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how 
to do the just thing ; nor until we are at least so far 
on the way to being Christian, as to have understood 
that maxim of the poor half-way Mohammedan, " One 
hour in the execution of justice is worth seventy years 
of prayer." 

Supposing, then, we have it determined with ap- 
propriate justice, who is to do the hand-work, the next 
questions must be how the hand-workers are to be paid, 
and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they 
are to have. Now, the possible quantity of play depends 
on the possible quantity of pay ; and the quantity of pay 
is not a matter for consideration to hand-workers only, 



WORK. !39 

but to all workers. Generally, good, useful work, 
whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not 
paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always 
IS so. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused or 
being cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a 
year to your talker, and a shilling a day to 3^our 
fighter, digger, and thinker is the rule. None of the 
best head-work in art, literature, or science, is ever 
paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his 
Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter bread 
and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. 
In science, the man who discovered the telescope, and 
first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon ; the man 
who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died 
of starvation, driven from his home : it is indeed very 
clear that God means all thoroughly good work and 
talk to be done for nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did 
not get a penny a line for writing Jeremiah's second roll 
for him, I fancy ; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's 
pay for that long sermon of his to the Pharisees ; noth- 
ing but stones. For indeed that is the world-father's 
proper payment. So surely as any of the world's chil- 
dren work for the world's good, honestly, with head 
and heart ; and come to it, saying, " Give us a little 
bread, just to keep the life in us," the world-father 
answers them, " ]^o, my children, not bread ; a stone, 
if you like, or as many as you need, to keep you 
quiet." But the hand- workers are not so ill off as all 



30 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVK 

this comes to. The worst that can happen to you is 
to break stones; not be broken by them. And for 
you there will come a time for better payment ; some 
clay, assuredly, more pence will be paid to Peter the 
Fisherman and fewer to Peter the Pope ; we shall pay 
people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and 
doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it 
and doing something; we shall pay our plowman a 
little more and our law3^er a little less, and so on : but, 
at least, we may even now take care that whatever 
work is done shall be fully paid for ; and the man w^ho 
does it paid for it, not somebody else ; and that it shall 
be done in an orderly, soldierly, well-guided, wholesome 
way, under good captains and lieutenants of labor; 
and that it shall have its appointed times of rest, and 
enough of them; and that in those times the play 
shall be wholesome play, not in theatrical gardens, 
with tin flowers and gas sunshine, and girls dancing 
because of their misery ; but in true gardens, with real 
flowers and real sunshine, and children dancing because 
of their gladness ; so that truly the streets shall be 
full (the " streets," mind you, not the gutters) of chil- 
dren, pla^ang in the midst thereof. We may take care 
that workingmen shall have at least as good books to 
read as anybody else, when they've time to read them ; 
and as comfortable firesides to sit at as anybody else, 
when they've time to sit at them. This, I think, can be 
managed for you, my working friends, in the good time 



WOBK. 31 

TV. I must go on, however, to our last head, con- 
cerning ourselves all, as workers. What is wise work, 
and what is foolish w^ork ? What the difference be- 
tween sense and nonsense, in daily occupation ? 

Well, wise work is, briefly, work with God. Foolish 
work is work against God. And work done with God, 
which He will help, may be briefly described as " Put- 
ting in Order " — that is, enforcing God's law of order, 
spiritual and material, over men and things. The first 
thing you have to do, essentially ; the real '' good 
work " is, with respect to men, to enforce justice, and 
with respect to things, to enforce tidiness, and fruit- 
fulness. And against these two great human deeds, 
justice and order, there are perpetually two great de- 
mons contending — the devil of iniquity, or inequity, 
and the devil of disorder, or of death ; for death is 
only consummation of disorder. You have to fight 
these two fiends daily. So far as you don't fight 
against the fiend of iniquity, you work for him. You 
" work iniquity," and the judgment upon you, for all 
your " Lord, Lord's," will be ''' Depart from me, ye that 
work iniquity." And so far as you do not resist the 
fiend of disorder, you work disorder, and you your- 
self do the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its 
wages. Death himself. 

Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in 
character. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. 

I. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more 



32 THE CROWK OF WILD OLIVE. 

strange than that you recognize honesty in play, and 
you do not in work. In your lightest games, you 
have always some one to see what you call "fair 
play." In boxing, you must hit fair ; in racing, start 
fair. Your English watch-word is fair play, your En- 
glish hatred, foul play. Did it ever strike you that 
you wanted another watch-word also, fair work, and 
another hatred also, foul work ? Your prize-fighter 
has some honor in him 3^et ; and so have the men in the 
ring round him : they will judge him to lose the match, 
by foul hitting. But your prize merchant gains his 
match by foul selling, and no one cries out against 
that. You drive a gambler out of the gambling-room 
who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in flourish- 
ing business, who loads scales! For observe, all dis- 
honest dealing is loading scales. What does it matter 
whether I get short weight, adulterate substance, or 
dishonest fabric ? The fault in the fabric is incompar- 
ably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of 
food, and I only lose by you ; but give me adulterate 
food, and I die by you. Here, then, is your chief duty, 
you workmen and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, 
and to us who would help you. We can do nothing 
for you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty. Get 
that, you get all ; without that, your suffrages, your re- 
forms, your free-trade measures, your institutions of 
science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your heads 
logether, if you can't put your hearts together. 



WORK 33 

Shoulder to shoulder, right hand to right hand among 
yourselves, and no wrong hand to anybody else, and 
you'll win the world yet. 

II. Then, secondly, wise work is useful. ISTo man 
minds, or ought to mind, its being hard, if only it 
comes to something ; but when it is hard, and comes 
to nothing; when all our bees' business turns to 
spiders' ; and for honey-comb we have only resultant 
cobweb, blown away by the next breeze — that is the 
cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask our- 
selves, personally, or even nationally, whether our 
work is coming to anything or not ? We don't care to 
keep what has been nobly done ; still less do we care to do 
nobly what others would keep ; and, least of all, to make 
the work itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, 
so as to use his life indeed, but not to waste it. Of all 
wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the 
waste of labor. If you went down in the morning 
into your dairy, and you found that your youngest 
child had got down before you ; and that he and the 
cat were at play together, and that he had poured out 
all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you 
would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was 
wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in 
them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, 
and instead of the cat to play with — the devil to play 
with; and you yourself the player; and instead of 
leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the 



34 THE CROWN OF WILD OLl VE. 

fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour 
the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to 
lick up — that is no waste ! What ! you perhaps think, 
" to waste the labor of men is not to kill them." Is it 
not ? I should like to know how you could kill them 
more utterly — kill them with second deaths, seventh 
deaths, hundredfold deaths ? It is the slightest Avay of 
killing to stop a man's breath. E'ay, the hunger, and 
the cold, and the little whistling buUets — or love-mes- 
sengers between nation and nation — have brouglit 
pleasant messages from us to many a man before now ; 
orders of sweet release, and leave at last to go where 
he will be most welcome and most happy. At the 
worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt 
his life. But if you put him to base labor, if you bind 
his thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his 
hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body, and 
blast his soul, and at last leave him not so much as to 
reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that 
for yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you 
have done with him, having, so far as in you lay, made 
the walls of that grave everlasting (though, indeed, I 
fancy the goodly bricks of some of our family vaults 
will hold closer in the resurrection day than the sod 
over the laborer's head), this you think is no waste, 
and no sin! 

III. Then, lastly, wise work is cheekffl, as a child's 
work is. And now I want you to take one thought 
home with you, and^let Ustay with you. 



WOBK. 35 

Everybody in this room has been tauo^ht to pray 
daily, " Thy kingdom come." Now, if we hear a man 
swear in the streets, we think it very wrong, and say 
he " takes God's name in vain." But there's a twenty 
times worse way of taking His name in vain than 
that. It is to ask God for what we donH want. He 
doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't want a 
thing, don't ask .for it : such asking is the worst mock- 
ery of your King you can mock Him with ; the sol- 
diers striking Him on the head with the reed was 
nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, 
don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more 
than pray for it ; you must work for it. And, to work 
for it, you must know what it is : we have all prayed 
for it many a day without thinking. Observe, it is a 
kingdom that is to come to us ; we are not to go to it. 
Also, it is not to be a kingdom of the dead, but of the 
living. Also, it is not to come all at once, but quietly ; 
nobody knows how. " The kingdom of God cometh 
not with observation." Also, it is not to come outside 
of us, but in the hearts of us : '' the kingdom of God 
is within you." And, being within us, it is not a thing 
to be seen, but to be felt ; and though it brings all 
substance of good with it, it does not consist in that : 
"the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but 
righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost :" joy, 
that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit. 
Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to 



36 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

bring it, and enter into it, there's just one condition to 
be first accepted. You must enter it as children, or 
not at all ; " Whosoever will not receive it as a little 
child shall not enter therein." And again, "Suffer 
little children to come unto me, and forbid them rn^t^ 
for of such is the kingdom of heaven." 

Of such, observe. Not of children themselves, but 
of such as children. I believe most mothers who read 
that text think that all heaven is to be full of babies. 
But that's not so. There will be children there, but 
the hoary head is the crown. " Length of days, and 
long life and peace," that is the blessing, not to die in 
babyhood. Children die but for their parents' sin; 
God means them to live, but He can't let them always ; 
then they have their earlier place in heaven : and the 
little child of David, vainly prayed for ; the little child 
of Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its own 
threshold — they will be there. But weary old David, 
and weary old Barzillai, having learned children's les- 
sons at last, will be there too, and the one question for 
us all, young or old, is, have we learned our child's les- 
son ? it is the character of children we want, and must 
gain at our peril; let us see, briefly, in what it 
consists. 

The first character of right childhood is that it is 
Modest. A well-bred child does not think it can teach 
its parents, or that it knows everything. It may think 
its father and mother knows everything — perhaps that 



WORK. 37 

all grown-up people know everything; very certainly 
it is sure that it does not. And it is always asking 
questions, and wanting to know more. Well, that is 
the first character of a good and wise man at his work. 
To know that he knows very little — to perceive that 
there are many above him wiser than he ; and to be al- 
ways asking questions, wanting to learn, not to teacL 
ISO one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or gov- 
erns well who wants to govern; it is an old saying 
(Plato's, but I know not if his, first), and as wise as 
old. 

Then, the second character of right childhood is to 
be Faithful. Perceiving that its father knows best 
what is good for it, and having found always, when it 
has tried its own way against his, that he was right 
and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last 
wholly, gives him its hand, and will walk blindfold 
with him, if he bids it. And that is the true character 
of all good men also, as obedient workers, or soldiers 
under captains. They must trust their captains — they 
are bound for their lives to choose none but those 
whom they can trust. Then, they are not always to 
be thinking that what seems strange to them, or 
vrong in what they are desired to do, is strange or 
wiong. They know their captain: where he leads 
they must follow, what he bids, they must do; and 
without this trust and faith, without this captainship 
and soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, is 



38 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

possible to man. Among all the nations it is only 
when this faith is attained by them that they become 
great : the Jew, the Greek and the Mohammedan agree 
at least in testifying to this. It was a deed of this ab- 
solute trust which made Abraham the father of the 
f .ithlal ; it was the declaration of the power of God 
as captain over all men, and the acceptance of a leader 
appointed by Him as commander of the faithful, which 
laid the foundation of whatever national power yet ex- 
ists in the East; and the deed of the Greeks, which 
has become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership 
to all lands, and to all [times, was commemorated, on 
the tomb of those who gave their lives to do it, in the 
most pathetic, so far as I know, or can feel, of all hu- 
man utterances : '^ Oh, stranger, go and tell our people 
that we are lying here, having obeyed their words." 

Then the third character of right childhood is to be 
Loving and Generous. Give a little love to a child, 
and you get a great deal back. It loves everything 
near it, when it is a right kind of child — would hurt 
nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if 
you need it — does not lay plans for getting everything 
in the house for itself, and delights in helping people ; 
you cannot please it so much as by giving it a chance 
of being useful, in ever so little a way. 

And because of all these characters, lastly, it is 
Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, it is careful 
for nothing — being full of love to ererj creatui'e, it is 



WORK. 39 

happy always, whether in its play or in its duty. 
Well, that's the great worker's character also. Tak- 
ing no thought for the morrow ; taking thought only 
for the duty of the day ; trusting somebody else to 
take care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed what labor 
is, but not what sorrow is ; and always ready for play 
— beautiful play — for lovely human play is like the 
play of the Sun. There's a worker for you. He, 
steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his 
course, but also, he rejoiceth as a strong man to run his 
course. See how he plays in the morning, with the 
mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray here 
and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere 
— that's the Sun's play ; and great human play is like 
his — all various — all full of light and life, and tender, 
as the dew of the morning. 

So then, you have the child's character in these four 
things — Humility, Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. 
That's what you have got to be converted to. " Ex- 
cept ye be converted and become as little children " — 
You hear much of conversion nowadays; but people 
always seem to think they have got to be made 
wretched by conversion — to be converted to long faces. 
No, friends, you have got to be converted to short 
ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent 
into delight, and delightsomeness. You can't go into 
a conventicle but you'll hear plenty of talk of back- 
sliding. Backsliding, indeed ! I can tell you, on the 



40 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVK 

ways most of us go, the faster we slide back the better . 
Slide back into the cradle, if going on is into the grave 
—back, I tell you ; back — out of your long faces, and 
into your long clothes. It is among children only, 
and as children only, that you will find medicine for 
your healing and true wisdom for your teaching. 
There is poison in the counsels of the men of this 
world ; the words they speak are all bitterness, " the 
poison of asps is under their lips," but, ^' the sucking 
child shall play by the hole of the asp." There is 
death in the looks of men. " Their eyes are privily 
set against the poor;" they are as the uncharmable 
serpent, the cockatrice, which slew, by seeing. But 
'* the weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice 
den." There is death in the steps of men : " their feet 
are swift to shed blood; they have compassed us in 
our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and 
the young lion lurking in secret places," but, in that 
kingdom, the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and 
the fatling with the lion, and " a little child shall lead 
them." There is death in the thoughts of men : the 
world is one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as 
it draws to a close ; but the secret of it is known to 
the child, and the Lord of heaven and earth is most to 
be thanked in that '' He has hidden these things from 
the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto 
babes." Yes, and there is death — infinitude of death 
in the principalities and powers of men. As far as 



WORK 41 

the east is from the west, so far our sins are — not set 
from us, but multiplied around us: the Sun himself, 
think you he now " rejoices " to run his course, when 
he plunges westward to the horizon, so widely red, not 
with clouds, but blood? And it will be red more 
widely yet. Whatever drought of the early and latter 
rain may be, there will be none of that red rain. You 
fortify yourselves, you arm yourselves against it in 
vain ; the enemy and avenger will be upon you also, 
unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the 
knitted gun, or the smoothed rifle, but "out of the 
mouths of babes and sucklings " that the strength is 
ordained, which shall " still the enemy and avenger." 



LECTUKE 11. 

TRAFFIC. 
{Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford ) 

My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down 
here among your hills that I might talk to you about 
this Exchange you are going to build : but earnestly 
and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to 
do nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can 
say very little, about this same Exchange. I must 
talk of quite other things, though not willingly; I 
could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited 
me to speak on one subject, I willfully spoke on an- 
other. But I cannot speak, to purpose, of anything 
about which I do not care ; and most simply and 
sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do 
not care about this Exchange of yours. 

If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I 
had answered, " I won't, come, I don't care about the 
Exchange of Bradford," you Avould have been justly 
offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt 
a carelessness. So I have come down, hoping that 
you will patiently let me tell you why, on this, and 



TRAFFIC. 43 

many other such occasions, I now remain silent, when 
formerly I should have caught at the opportunity of 
speaking to a gracious audience. 

In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange— 
because you don't ; and because you know perfectly well 
I cannot make you. Look at the essential circum- 
stances of the case, which you, as business men, know 
perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget 
them. You are going to spend £30,000, which to y(ju, 
collectively, is nothing ; the buying a new coat is, as to 
the cost of it, a much more important matter of con- 
sideration to me than building a new Exchange is to 
you. But you think you may as well have the right 
thing for your money. You know there are a great 
many odd styles of architecture about ; you don't want 
to do anything ridiculous; you hear of me, among 
others, as a respectable architectural man-milliner: 
and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading 
fashion; and what is, in our shops, for the moment, 
the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. 

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot 
have good architecture merely by asking people's ad- 
vice on occasion. All good architecture is the expres- 
sion of national life and character ; and it is produced 
by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire 
for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the 
deep significance of this word " taste ;" for no state 
ment of mine has been more earnestly or oftener cou 



44 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

troverted than that good taste is essentially a moral 
quality. "]^o," say many of my antagonists, "taste 
is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is 
pretty ; we shall be glad to know that ; but preach no 
sermons to us." 

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of 
mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an in- 
dex of morality — it is the only morality. The first, 
and last, and closest trial question to any living creat- 
ure is, " What do you like V Tell me what you like, 
and I'll tell j^ou what you are. Go out into the street, 
and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their 
" taste " is, and if they answer candidly, you know 
them, body and soul. "You, my friend in the rags, 
with the unsteady gait, what do you like ?" " A pipe . 
and a quartern of gin." I know you. "You, good 
woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do 
you like ?" " A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, 
and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my 
breast." Good, I know you also. "You, little girl 
with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you 
like ?" " My canary, and a run among the wood hya- 
cinths." " You, little boy with the dirty hands and 
the low forehead, what do you like ?" "A shy at the 
sparrows, and a game at pitch-farthing." Good ; we 
know them all now. What more need we ask? 

" I^ay," perhaps you answer : " we need rather to ask 
what these people and children do, than what they 



TnAFFTG. 45 

like. If they do right, it is no matter that they like 
what is wrong ; and if they do wrong, it is no matter 
that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing ; 
and it does not matter that the man likes drinking, so 
that he does not drink ; nor that the little girl likes to 
ke kind to her canary, if she will not learn her lessons ; 
nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the 
sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday-school." Indeed, 
for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. 
For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they 
come to like doing it. But they only are in a right 
moral state when they have come to like doing it ; and 
as long as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious 
state. The man is not in health of body who is always 
thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though he 
bravely bears his thirst ; but the man who heartily en- 
joys water in the morning and wine in the evening, 
each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire 
object of true education is to make people not merely 
do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not 
merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely 
learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but 
to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and 
thirst after justice. 

But you may answer or think, " Is the liking for out- 
side ornaments — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, 
or architecture — a moral quality ?" Yes, most surely, 
if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pictures or 



m THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones 
is. Only here again we have to define the word 
" good." I don't mean by " good," clever — or learned 
— or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by Teniers, 
of sots quarreling over their dice : it is an entirely 
clever picture ; so clever that nothing in its kind has 
ever been done equal to it ; but it is also an entirely 
base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight 
in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and 
delight in that is an " unmannered," or "immoral" 
quality. It is "bad taste" in the profoundest sense — 
it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a 
picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, 
or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the per- 
petual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. 
That is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of 
the angels. And all delight in art, and aU love of it, 
resolve themselves into simple love of that which 
deserves love. That deserving is the quality which 
we call " loveliness " (we ought to have an opposite 
word, hateliness, to be said of the things which de- 
serve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor 
optional thing whether w^e love this or that; but it is 
just the vital function of all our being. What we like 
determines what we are^ and is the sign of what we 
are ; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. 
As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street 
the other day, my eye caught the title of a book 



TRAFFIC. 47 

standing open in a bookseller's window. It was, " On 
the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all 
classes." " Ah," I thought to myself, '' my classifying 
friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will 
your classes be? The man who likes what you like, 
belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevita- 
bly so. You may put him to other Avork if you 
choose ; but, by the condition you have brought him 
into, he will dislike the other work as much as you 
would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a 
costermonger, who enjo3^ed the Newgate Calendar for 
literature, and ' Pop goes the Weasel ' for music. You 
think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven ? 
I wish you joy of your lessons ; but if you do, you 
have made a gentleman of him — he won't like to go 
back to his costermongering." 

And so completely and unexceptionallj is this so, 
that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a 
nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, 
without expressing it, legibly, and forever, either in 
bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no 
national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly 
expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the 
people possessing that virtue to produce. Take, for 
instance, your great English virtue of enduring and 
patient courage. You have at present in England 
only one art of any consequence — that is, iron-work- 
ing. You know thoroughly well how to cast and 



48 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

hammer iron. Now, do you think in those masses of 
lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which 
you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have 
created ; do you think, on those iron plates, your cour- 
ao^e and endurance are not written forever — not merely 
with an iron pen, but on iron parchment ? And take 
also your great English vice — European vice — vice of 
all the world — vice of all other worlds that roll or 
shine in heaven, bearing with them yet the atmos- 
phere of hell — the vice of jealousy, which brings com- 
petition into your commerce, treachery into your coun- 
cils, and dishonor into your wars — that vice which has 
rendered for you, and for your next neighboring 
nation, the daily occupations of existence no longer 
possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and the 
sword loose in its sheath ; so that, at last, you have 
realized for all the multitudes of the two great peoples 
who lead the so-called civilization of the earth — you 
have realized for them all, I say, in person and in 
policy, what was once true only of the rough Border 
riders of your Cheviot hills — 

" They carved at the meal 
With gloves of steel, 
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;" 

do you think that this national shame and dastardli- 
ness of heart are not written as legibly on every rivet 
of your iron armor as the strength of the right hands 
that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this 



TRAFFIC. 49 

thing be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. 
It is quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of 
being now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some 
private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his 
garden separated only by a fruit-wall from his next-door 
neighbor's ; and he had called me to consult with him on 
the furnishing of his drawing-room. I begin looking 
about me, and find the walls rather bare ; I think such 
and such a paper might be desirable — perhaps a little 
fresco here and there on the ceiling — a damask curtain 
or so at the windows. "Ah," says my employer, 
"damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but 
you know I can't afford that kind of thing just now !" 
" Yet the world credits you with a splendid income!" 
"Ah, yes," says my friend, "but do you know, at 
present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel- 
traps ? " " Steel-traps ! for whom ? " " Why, for that 
fellow on the other side the wall, you know : we're 
very good friends, capital friends ; but we are obliged 
to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we 
could not possibly keep on friendly terms without 
them, and our spring-guns. The worst of it is, we are 
both clever fellows enough ; and there's never a day 
passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun- 
barrel, or something ; we spend about fifteen millions 
a year each in our traps, take it altogether; and I 
don't see how Ave're to do with less." A highly comic 
state of life for two private gentlemen; but for two 



50 THE CMOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam 
would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one mad- 
man in it ; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, 
when there is only one clown in it ; but when the 
whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its 
own heart's-blood instead of vermilion, it is something 
else than comic, I think. 

Mind, I know a ^reat deal of this is play, and will- 
ingly allow for that. You don't know what to do 
with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting and 
cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this 
unendurably long mortal life: you liked pop-guns 
when you were school- boys, and rifles and Armstrongs 
are only the same things better made : but then the 
worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, 
was not play to the sparrows ; and what is play to you 
now, is not play to the small birds of State neither ; 
and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of 
taking shots at them, if I mistake not. 

I must get back to the matter in hand, however. 
Believe me, without further instance, I could show 
you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, 
was written in its art : the soldiership of early Greece ; 
the sensuality of late Italy ; the visionary religion of 
Tuscany ; the splendid human energy and beauty of 
Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have 
done it elseAvhere before now) ; but I proceed to apply 
the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner. 



TRAFFIC. 51 

I notice that among all the new buildings that cover 
your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in 
due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills 
and mansions, and I notice also that the churches and 
schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions 
and mills are never Gothic. "Will you allow me to 
ask precisely the meaning of this ? For, remember, it 
is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When Gothic 
was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches ; 
and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, 
churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a 
Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a 
Gothic belfry to the Hotel de Yille at Brussels ; if 
Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher 
Wren builds an Italian St. Paul's. But now you live 
under one school of architecture, and worship under 
another. What do you mean by doing this ? Am I 
to understand that you are thinking of changing your 
architecture back to Gothic ; and that you treat your 
churches experimentally, because it does not matter 
what mistakes you make in a church ? Or am I to 
understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently 
sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you 
think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for 
the tabernacle only, and reserved for your religious serv- 
ices? For if this be the feeling, though it may seem 
at first as if it were graceful and reverent, you will find 
that, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more 



52 TEE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

nor less than that you have separated your religion 
from your life. 

For consider what a wide significance this fact has ; 
and remember that it is not you only, but all the people 
of England, who are behaving thus just now. 

You have all got into the habit of calling the church 
" the house of God." I have seen, over the doors of 
many churches, the legend actuall}^ carved, " This is 
the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 
l^ow, note where that legend comes from, and of what 
place it was first spoken. A boy leaves his father's 
house to go on a long journey on foot, to visit his un- 
cle ; he has to cross a wild hill-desert ; just as if one 
of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmore- 
land, to visit an uncle at Carlisle. The second or third 
day your boy finds himself somewhere between Hawes 
and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at sunset. It 
is stony ground, and boggy ; he cannot go one foot 
further that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharn- 
side, where best he may, gathering a few of the stones 
together to put under his head — so wild the place is, 
he cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying 
under the broad night, he has a dream ; and he sees a 
ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to 
heaven, and the angels of God are ascending and de- 
scending upon it. And when he wakes out of his 
sleep, he says, " How dreadful is this place ; surely, 
this is none other than the house of God, and this is 



TRAFFIC. 53 

the gate of heaven.^ This place, observe; not this 
church; not this city; not this stone, even, which he 
puts up for a memorial — the piece of flint on which 
his head has lain. But this place ; this windy slope 
of Wharnside; this moorland hollow, torrent-bitten, 
snow-blighted ; this a7iy place where God lets down 
the ladder. And how are you to know where that 
will be ? or how are you to determine where it may be, 
but by being ready for it always? Do you know 
where the lightning is to fall next? You do know 
that, partly ; you can guide the lightning ; but you 
cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit, which is 
that lightning when it shines from the east to the 
west. 

But the perpetual and insolent warping of that 
strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose 
is only one of the thousand instances in which we 
sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 
" temples." ISTow, you know, or ought to know, they 
are not temples. They have never had, never can have, 
anything whatever to do with temples. They are 
^' synagogues " — " gathering places " — where you gather 
yourselves together as an assembly ; and by not calling 
them so, you again miss the force of another mighty 
text — " Thou, when thou prayest, shall not be as the 
hypocrites are ; for they love to pray standing in the 
chiiTclies^'' [we should translate it], "that they maj^ be 
seen of men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into 



54 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to 
thy Father " — which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but 
" in secret." 

Now, you feel, as I say this to you — I know you feel 
— as if I were trying to take away the honor of your 
churches. Not so ; I am trying to prove to you the 
honor of your houses and your hills ; I am trying to 
show you — not that the Church is not sacred — but 
that the whole Earth is. I would have you feel, what 
careless, what constant, what infectious sin there is in 
all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your churches 
only " holy," you call your hearths and homes profane ; 
and have separated yourselves from the heathen by 
casting all your household gods to the ground, instead 
of recognizing, in the place of their many and feeble 
Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and 
Lar. 

" But what has all this to do with our Exchange ?" 
3^ou ask me, impatiently. My dear friends, it has just 
everything to do with it; on these inner and great 
questions depend all the outer and little ones ; and if 
you have asked me down here to speak to you, because 
you had before been interested in anything I have 
written, you must know that all I have yet said about 
architecture was to show this. The book I called 
" The Seven Lamps " was to show that certain right 
states of temper and moral feeling were the magic 
powers by which all good architecture, without excep- 



TRAFFIC. 55 

tion, had been produced. "The Stones of Yenice" 
had, from beginning to end, no other aim than to show 
that the Gothic architecture of Yenice had arisen out of, 
and indicated in all its fea,tures, a state of pure national 
faith, and of domestic virtue; and that its Eenais- 
sance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its 
features indicated, a state of concealed national in- 
fidelity, and of domestic corruption. And now, you 
ask me what style is best to build in ; and how can I 
answer, knowing the meaning of the two styles, but 
by another question — do you mean to build as Chris- 
tians or as Infidels ? And still more — do you mean to 
build as honest Christians or as honest Infidels? as 
thoroughly and confessedly either one or the other ? 
You don't like to be asked such rude questions. I 
cannot help it; they are of much more importance 
than this Exchange business ; and if they can be at 
once answered, the Exchange business settles itself in 
a moment. But, before I press them further, I must 
ask leave to explain one point clearly. In all my past 
work, my endeavor has been to show that good archi- 
tecture is essentially religious — the production of a 
faithful and virtuous, not of an infidel and corrupted 
people. But in the course of doing this, I have had 
also to show that good architecture is not eGclesiastical. 
People are so apt to look upon religion as the business 
of the clergy, not their own, that the moment they 
hear of anything depending on " religion," they think 



56 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

it must also have depended on the priesthood ; and 1 
have had to take what place was to be occupied be- 
tween these two errors, and fight both, often with 
seeming contradiction. Good architecture is the work 
of good and believing men; therefore, you say, at 
least some people say, " Good architecture must essen- 
tially have been the work of the clergy, not of the 
laity." No — a thousand times no; good architecture 
has always been the work of the commonalty, not of 
the clergy. What, you say, those glorious cathedrals 
— the pride of Europe — did their builders not form 
Gothic architecture ? No ; they corrupted Gothic ar- 
chitecture. Gothic was formed in the baron's castle, 
and the burgher's street. It was formed by the 
thoughts, and hands, and powers of free citizens and 
soldier-kings. By the monk it was used as an instru- 
ment for the aid of his superstition ; when that super- 
stition became a beautiful madness, and the best hearts 
of Europe vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, 
and vainly raged and perished in the crusade — through 
that fury of perverted faith and wasted war, the 
Gothic rose also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, 
finally, most foolish dreams; and, in those dreams, 
was lost, 

I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunder- 
standing me when I come to the gist of what I want 
to say to-night — when I repeat, that every great 
national architecture has been the result and exponent 



TRAFFIC. 57 

of a great national religion. You can't have bits of it 
here, bits there — you must have it everywhere, or no- 
where. It is not the monopoly of a clerical company 
— it is not the exponent of a theological dogma — it is. 
not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priest- 
hood ; it is the manly language of a people inspired by 
resolute and common purpose, and rendering resolute 
and common fidelity to the legible laws of an un- 
doubted God. 

]S"ow, there have as yet been three distinct schools 
of European architecture. I say, European, because 
Asiatic and African architectures belong so entirely to 
other races and climates, that there is no question of 
them here ; only, in passing, I will simply assure you 
that whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, 
and India, is just good or great for the same reasons 
as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. We 
Europeans, then, have had three great religions : the 
Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom 
and power ; the Mediaeval, which was the Worship of 
the God of Judgment and Consolation; the Eenais- 
sance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and 
Beauty ; these three we have had — they are past — and 
now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, 
and a God of our own, about which I want to ask you. 
But I must explain these three old ones first. 

T repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshiped the 
G()(i of Wisdom; so that whatever contended against 



58 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVK 

their religion — to the Jews a stumbling-block — was, to 
the Greeks — Foolishness. 

The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in 
the word, of which we keep the remnant in our words 
"i>^-urnal" and "i>^-vine" — the god of Day^ Jupiter 
the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially 
daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the 
head. We are only with the help of recent investigation 
beginning to penetrate the depth of meaning couched 
under the Athenaic symbols ; but I may note rapidly, 
that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in 
which she often, in the best statues, is represented as 
folding up her left hand for better guard, and the 
Gorgon on her shield, are both representative mainly 
of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to 
stone, as it were), of the outmost and superficial 
spheres of knowledge — that knowledge which sepa- 
rates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of 
the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For 
out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, 
danger, and disdain ; but from perfect knowledge, 
given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, 
in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, 
and bears the resistless spear. 

This, then, was the Greek conception of purest 
Deity, and every habit of life, and every form of his 
art developed themselves from the seeking this bright, 
serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself, as a 



TRAFFIC. 59 

man, to do things evermore rightly and strongly ;* 
not with any ardent affection or ultimate hope ; but 
with a resolute and continent energy of will, as know- 
ing that for failure there was no consolation, and for 
sin there was no remission. And the Greek architect- 
ure rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self 
contained. 

Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, 
which was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its 
great doctrine is the remission of sins ; for which cause 
it happens, too often, in certain phases of Christianity, 
that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified, 
as if, the more you had to be healed of, the more 
divine was the healing. The practical result of this 
doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin 
=ind disease, and of imaginary states of purification 
from them ; thus we have an architecture conceived in 
a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, 
partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself 
lo every one of our needs, and every one of our fancies, 

* It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, 
was chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, 
founded on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not 
Beauty, but Design: and the Dorian Apollo- worship and Athenian 
Virgin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom 
and Purity. Next to these great deities rank, in power over the 
national mind, Dionysus and Ceres, the givers of human strength and 
life: then, for heroic example, Hercules. There is no Venus- wor- 
ship among the Greeks in the great times: and the Muses are esseij- 
tially teachers of Triitli, and of its harmo»ies. 



60 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or 
weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, 
when base people build it — of all, the noblest, when 
built by the noble. 

And now note that both these religions — Greek and 
Mediaeval — perished by falsehood in their own main 
purpose. The Greek religion of Wisdom perished in a 
false philosophy — " Oppositions of science, falsely so- 
called." The Mediaeval religion of Consolation 
perished in false comfort; in remission of sins given 
lyingly. It was the selling of absolution that ended 
the Mediaeval faith; and I can tell 3^ou more, it is the 
selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will 
mark false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her 
remission of sins only by ending them; but false 
Christianity gets her remission of sins by compound- 
ing for them. And there are many ways of com- 
pounding for them. We English have beautiful little 
quiet ways of buying absolution, whether in low 
Church or high, far more cunning than any of Tet- 
zel's trading. 

Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of 
I'leasure, in which all Europe gave itself to lux- 
ury, ending in death. First, hals masques in every 
saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And 
all these three worships issue in vast temple-build- 
ing. Your Greek worshiped Wisdom, and built 
you the Parthenon— the Yirgin's temple. The 



TRAFFIC, 61 

Mediaeval worshiDed Consolation, and built you 
Virgin temples also — but to our Lady of Salvation. 
Then the Kevivalist worshiped beauty, of a sort, and 
built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, 
will you tell me what lue worship, and what we build ? 
You know we are speaking always of the real, 
active, continual, national worship; that by which 
men act while they live ; not that which they talk of 
when they die. J^ow, we have, indeed, a nominal 
religion, to which we pay tithes of property and 
sevenths of time ; but we have also a practical and 
earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our 
property and sixth-sevenths of our time. And we dis- 
pute a great deal about the nominal religion; but we 
are all unanimous about this practical one, of which I 
think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be 
best generally described as the " Goddess of Getting- 
on," or "Britannia of the Market." The Athenians 
had an " Athena Agoraia," or Minerva of the Market ; 
but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, while 
our Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. 
And all your great architectural works, are, of course, 
built to her. It is long since you built a great cathe- 
dral ; and how you would laugh at me, if I proposed 
building a cathedral on the top of one of these hills of 
yours, taking it for an Acropolis ! But your railroad 
mounds, prolonged masses of Acropolis ; your railroad 
stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and innumerable ; 



62 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

your chimne3^s, how much more mighty and costly 
than cathedral spires! your harbor piers; your 
warehouses; your exchanges! — all these are built to 
your great Goddess of " Getting-on ;" and she has 
formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, 
as long as you worship her ; and it is quite vain to ask 
me to tell you how to build to her ; you know far 
better than I. 

There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceiv- 
ably good architecture for Exchanges — that is to say 
if there were any heroism in the fact or deed of ex- 
change, which might be typically carved on the out- 
side of your building. For, you know, all beautiful 
architecture mnst be adorned with sculpture or paint- 
ing ; and for sculpture or painting, you must have a 
subject. And hitherto it has been a received opinion 
among the nations of the world that the only right 
subjects for either, were heroisms of some sort. Even 
on his pots and his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules 
slaying lions, or an Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus 
slaying melancholy giants, and earth-born desponden- 
cies. On his temples, the Greek put contests of great 
warriors in founding states, or of gods with evil spirits. 
On his houses and temples alike, the Christian put 
carvings of angels conquering devils; or of hero- 
martyrs exchanging this world for another; subject 
inappropriate, I think, to our manner of exchange h^re. 
And the Master of Christians not only left his follow- 



II 



TRAFFIC, 63 

ers without any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of 
exchange on the outside of buildings, but gave some 
strong evidence of his dislike of affairs of exchange 
within them. And yet there might surely be a hero- 
ism in such affairs ; and all commerce become a kind 
of selling of doves, not impious. The wonder has 
always been great to me, that heroism has never been 
supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice 
of supplying people with food, or clothes ; but rather 
with that of quartering one's self upon them for food, 
and stripping them of their clothes. Spoiling of armor 
is an heroic deed in all ages; but the selling of 
clothes, old, or new, has never taken any color of 
magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding 
the hungry and clothing the naked should ever 
become base businesses, even when engaged in on 
a large scale. If one could contrive to attach the 
notion of conquest to them anyhow ? so that, sup- 
posing there were anywhere an obstinate race, who 
refused to be comforted, one might take some pride 
in giving them compulsory comfort ; and as it were, 
"occupying a country" with one's gifts, instead of 
one's armies? If one could only consider it as 
much a victory to get a barren field sown, as to 
get an earned field stripped ; and contend who should 
build villages, instead of who should " carry " them. 
Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in doing 
these serviceable deeds ? You doubt who is strongest ? 



64 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

It might be* ascertained by push of spade, as well as 
push of sword. Who is wisest? There are witty 
things to be thought of in planning other business than 
campaigns. Who is bravest ? There are always the 
elements to fight with stronger than men ; and nearly 
as merciless. The only absolutely and unapproachably 
heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be — that 
he is paid little for it — and regularly : while you 
traffickers, and exchangers, and others occupied in pre- 
sumably benevolent business, like to be paid much for 
it — and by chance. I never can make out how it is 
that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his 
trouble, but a peddler-errant always does — that people 
are willing to take hard knocks for nothing, but never 
to sell ribbons cheap — that they are ready to go on 
fervent crusades to recover the tomb of a buried God, 
never on any travels to fulfill the orders of a living 
God — that they will go an^^vhere barefoot to preach 
their faith, but must be well bribed to practice it, and 
are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but never 
the loaves and fishes. If you chose to take the matter 
up on any such soldierly principle, to do your com- 
merce, and your feeding of nations, for fixed salaries ; 
and to be as particular about giving people the best 
food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are about giving 
them the best gunpowder, I could carve something for 
3^ou on your exchange worth looking at. But I can 
only at present suggest decorating its frieze with 



TRAFFIC. 65 

pendant purses ; and making its pillars broad at the 
base for the sticking of bills. And in the innermost 
chambers of it there might be a statue of Britannia of 
vhe Market, who may have, perhaps advisably, a 
partridge for her crest, typical at once of her courage 
in fighting for noble ideas ; and of her interest in 
game; and round its neck the inscription in golden 
letters, " Ferdix fovit quae non peperit."* Then, for 
her spear, she might have a weaver's beam ; and on her 
shield, instead of her Cross, the Milanese boar, semi- 
fleeced, with the town of Gennesaret proper, in the 
field and the legend '' In the best market," and her 
corslet, of leather, folded over her heart in the shape 
of a purse, with thirty slits in it for a piece of money 
to go in at, on each day of the month. And I doubt 
not but that people would come to see your exchange, 
and its goddess, with applause. 

Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain 
strange characters in this goddess of yours. She dif- 
fers from the great Greek and Mediaeval deities es- 
sentially in two things — first, as to the continuance of 
her presumed power ; secondly, as to the extent of it. 

I. As to the Continuance. 

The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual in- 
crease of wisdom, as the Christian Spirit of Comfort 

*Jerem. xvii. 11 (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). "As the 
partridge, fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth 
riches, not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and 
at his end shall be a fool." 



66 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

(or Comforter) continual increase of comfort. There 
was no question, with these, of any limit or cessation 
of function. But with your Agora Goddess, that is 
just the most important question. Getting on — but 
where to ? Gathering together — but how much ? Do 
you mean to gather always — never to spend? If so, I 
wish you joy of your goddess, for I am just as well 
off as you, without the trouble of worshiping her at 
a-U. But if you do not spend, somebody else will — 
somebody else must. And it is because of this (among 
many other such errors) that I have fearlessly declared 
your so-called science of Political Economy to be no 
science ; because, namely, it has omitted the study of 
exactly the most important branch of the business — 
the study of sj)ending. For spend you must, and as 
much as you make, ultimately. Yoti gather corn : will 
you bury England under a heap of grain ; or will you, 
when you have gathered, finally eat? You gather 
gold : will you make your house-roofs of it, or pave 
your streets with it ? That is still one way of spend- 
ing it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, 
I'll give you more ; I'LL give 3^ou all the gold you want 
— all you can imagine — if you can tell me what you'll 
do with it. You shall have thousands of gold-pieces ; 
thousands of thousands — millions — mountains, of gold ; 
where will you keep them ? "Will you put an Olympus 
of silver upon a golden Pelion — make Ossa like a wart ? 
Do you think the rain and dew would then come down 



TRAFFIC. 67 

to you, in the streams from such mountains, more 
blessedly than they will down the mountains which 
God has made for you, of moss and whinstone ? But 
it is not gold that you want to gather ! What is it ? 
greenbacks ? ]^o ; not those neither. What is it then 
— is it ciphers after a capital I? Cannot you practice 
writing ciphers, and write as many as you want? 
Write ciphers for an hour every morning, in a big 
book, and say every evening, I am worth all those 
noughts more than I was yesterday. Won't that do ? 
Well, what in the name of Plutus is it you want? 
JSTot gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I ? 
You will have to answer, after all, " No ; we want, 
somehow or other, money's worths Well, what is 
that ? Let your Goddess of Getting-on discover it, and 
let her learn to stay therein. 

II. But there is yet another question to be asked 
respecting this Goddess of Getting-on. The first was 
of the continuance of her power ; the second is of its 
extent. 

Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the 
world's Pallas, and all the world's Madonna. They 
could teach aU men, and they could comfort all men. 
But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your 
Goddess of Getting-on ; and you will find she is the 
Goddess — not of everybody's getting on — but only of 
somebody's getting on. This is a vital, or rather 
deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own ideal of 



68 TEE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke 
and maintain. I asked you what it was, when I was 
last here ; you have never told me. E"ow, shall I try 
to tell you ? 

Your ideal of human life, then is, I think, that it 
should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with 
iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each 
pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful man- 
sion with two wings ; and stables, and coach-houses ; a 
moderately sized park ; a large garden and hot-houses ; 
and pleasant carriage-drives through the shrubberies. 
In this mansion are to live the favored votaries of the 
Goddess ; the English gentleman, with his gracious 
wife, and his beautiful family ; always able to have the 
boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful 
ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the 
sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. 
At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill ; not less 
than a quarter of a mile long, with a steam-engine at 
each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three 
hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant 
employment from eight hundred to a thousand work- 
ers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church 
on Sunday, and always express themselves in respect- 
ful language. 

Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the 
kind of thing you propose to yourselves ? It is very 
pretty indeed seen from above ; not at all so pretty, 



i 



TRAFFIC, 69 

seen from below. For, observe, while to one family 
this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting on, to a 
thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting 
on. "]^ay," 3^ou say, "they have all their chance." 
Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must 
always be the same number of blanks. " Ah ! but in 
a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take the 
lead, but blind chance." What then! do you think 
the old practice, that " they should take who have the 
power, and they should keep who can," is less iniqui- 
tous, when the power has become power of brains in- 
stead of fist ? and that, though we may not take ad- 
vantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may 
of a man's foolishness ? " I^ay, but finally, work must 
be done, and some one must be at the top, some one at 
the bottom." Granted, my friends. Work must 
always be, and captains of work must always be ; and 
if you in the least remember the tone of any of my 
Avritings, you must know that they are thought 
unfit for this age, because they they are always 
insisting on need of government, and speaking 
with scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe 
that there is wide difference between being cap- 
tains or governors of work, and taking the profits 
of it. It does not follow, because you are gen- 
eral of an army, that you are to take all the 
treasure or land, it wins (if it fight for treasure 
or land); neither, because you are king of a na- 



VO THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

tion, that you are to consume all the profits of 
the nation's work. Eeal kings, on the contrary, 
are known invariably by their doing quite the re- 
verse of this — by their taking the least possible 
quantity of the nation's work for themselves. There 
is no test of real kinghood so Infallible as that. 
Does the crowned creature live sirapl}^, bravely, un- 
ostentatiously ? probably he *s a King. Does he 
cover his body with jewels, and his table with deli- 
cates'^ in all probability he is not a King. It is 
possible he may be, as Solomon was ; but that is 
when the nation shares his splendor with him. 
Solomon made gold, not only to be in his own 
palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. 
But even so, for the most part, these splendid 
kinghoods expire in ruin, and only the true king- 
hoods live, which are of royal laborers governing 
loyal laborers; who, both leading rough lives, estab- 
lish the true dynasties. Conclusively you will find 
that because you are king of a nation, it does not 
follow that you are to gather for yourself all the 
wealth of that nation; neither, because you are 
king of a small part of the nation, and lord over 
the means of its maintenance — over field, or mill, 
or mine, are you to take all the produce of that 
piece of the foundation of national existence for 
yourself. 
You will tell me I need not preach against thes^ 



TRAFFIC, 71 

things, for I cannot mend them. No, good friends, I 
cannot ; but you can, and 3^ou will ; or something else 
can and will. Do you think these phenomena are to 
stay always in their present power or aspect? All 
history shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact 
thing they never can do. Change Tnust come ; but it 
is ours to determine whether change of growth, or 
change of death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins on 
its rock, and Bolton priory in its meadow, but these 
mills of yours be the consummation of the buildings of 
the earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of eter- 
nity ? Think you that " men may come, and men may 
go," but — mills — go on forever ? ]^ot so ; out of these, 
better or worse shall come ; and it is for you to choose 
which. 

I know that none of this wrong is done with delib- 
erate purpose. I know, on the contrary, that you wish 
your workmen well ; that you do much for them, and 
that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your 
way to it safely. I know that many of you have done, 
and are every day doing whatever you feel to be in your 
power ; and that even all this wrong and misery are 
brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of 
you striving to do his best, without noticing that this 
best is essentially and centrally the best for himself, 
not for others. And all this has come of the spread- 
ing of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of 
the modem economist, that " To do th^ best for your 



72 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

self, is finally to do the best for others." Friends, our 
great Master said not so ; and most absolutely we shall 
find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the best 
for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves ; but 
it will not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. 
The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan 
says of this matter ; hear what were, perhaps, the last 
written words of Plato — if not the last actually written 
(for this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and 
power his parting words — in which, endeavoring to 
give full crowning and harmonious close to all his 
thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imag- 
ined sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his 
heart fail him, and the words cease, broken off forever. 
It is the close of the dialogue called "Critias," in 
which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly 
in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the 
genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of 
Atlantis ; in which genesis he conceives the same first 
perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our 
own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that 
the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of 
men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been in- 
deed the children of God ; and to have corrupted them- 
selves, until " their spot was not the spot of his chil- 
dren." And this, he says, was the end ; that indeed 
"through many generations, so long as the God's 
nature in them yet was fuU, they were submissive to 



II 



TRAFFIC. V3 

the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all 
that had kindred with them in divineness ; for their 
uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in every 
wise great ; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they 
dealt with each other, and took all the chances of 
life ; and despising all things except virtue, they cared 
little what happened day by day, and hore lightly the 
lyurden of gold and of possessions : for they saw that, 
if only their common love and virtue increased, all 
these things would be increased together with them ; 
but to set their esteem and ardent pursuit upon mate- 
rial possession would be to lose that first, and their 
virtue and affection together with it. And by such 
reasoning, and what of the divine nature remained in 
them, they gained all this greatness of Avhich we have 
already told ; but when the God's part of them faded 
and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and 
effaced by the prevalent mortality ; and the human 
nature at last exceeded, they then became unable to 
endure the courses of fortune ; and fell into shapeless- 
ness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who 
could see, having lost everything that was fairest of 
their honor ; while to the blind hearts which could not 
discern the true life, tending to happiness, it seemed 
that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being 
filled Tvith an iniquity of inordinate possession and 
power. Whereupon, the God of Gods, whose King- 
hood is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus cast 



74 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon 
them as might make them repent into restraining, 
gathered together all the gods into his dwelling-place, 
which from heaven's center overlooks whatever has 
part in creation; and having assembled them, he 

said " 

The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of 
the chief wisdom of the heathen, spoken of this idol of 
riches ; this idol of yours ; this golden image high by 
measureless cubits, set up where your green fields of 
Enofland are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the 
plain of Dura: this idol, forbidden to us, first of all 
idols, by our own Master and faith ; forbidden to us 
also by every human lip that has ever, in any age or 
people, been accounted of as able to speak according to 
the purposes of God. Continue to make that forbid- 
den deity your principal one, and soon no more art, no 
more science, no more pleasure will be possible. 
Catastrophe will come ; or worse than catastrophe, 
slow moldering and withering into Hades. But if 
you can fix some conception of a true human state of 
life to be striven for — life for all men as for yourselves 
if you can determine some honest and simple order of 
existence; following those trodden ways of wisdom, 
w4iich are pleasantness, and seeking her quiet and 
withdrawn paths, which are peace; then, and so 
sanctifying wealth unto "commonwealth," all your 
r.rt, your literature, your daily labors, your domestic 



TRAFFIC, 75 

affection, and citizen's duty, will join and increase into 
one magnificent harmony. You will know then how 
to build, well enough ; you will build with stone well 
but with flesh better ; temples not made with hands, 
but riveted of hearts; and that kind of marble, 
crimson-veined, is inaeed eternal. 



LECTURE III. 

WAR. 

{Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.) 

Young Soldiers— I do not doubt but that many of 
you came unwillingly to-night, and many in merely 
contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on 
painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, 
respecting your great art of war. You may w^ell 
think within yourselves, that a painter might, perhaps 
without immodesty, lecture younger painters upon 
painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young 
physicians upon medicine — least of all, it may seem to 
you, young warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I 
was asked to address you, I declined at first, and de- 
chned long ; for I felt that you would not be interested 
in my special business, and would certainly think there 
was small need for me to come to teach you yours, 
Nay, I knew that there ought to to be 7io such need, 
for the great veteran soldiers of England are now men 
every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so good, that 
no other teaching than their knightly example, and 
their few words of grave and tried counsel should be 



WAR. 77 

either necessary for you, or even, without assurance of 
due modesty in the offerer, endured by you. 

But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not vent- 
ured persistently to refuse; and I will try, in very 
few words, to lay before you some reason why you 
should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You 
may imagine that your work is wholly foreign to, 
and separate from mine. So far from that, all the 
pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war ; no 
great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of 
soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if 
it remains at peace. There is no art among an agri- 
cultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is 
barely consistent with fine art ; but cannot produce it. 
Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but in- 
variably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is 
no great art possible to a nation but that which is 
based on battle. 

Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own 
sake, you must, I imagine, be surprised at my assertion 
that there is any such good fruit of fighting. You 
supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the 
works of peace, but certainly not to found them : nay, 
the common course of war, you may have thought, was 
only to destroy them. And truly, I who tell you this 
of the use of war, should have been the last of men to 
tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. 
Hear why ; I have given a considerable part of my life 



78 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

to the investigation of Venetian paintmg, and the re- 
suit of that inquiry vvas my fixing upon one man as the 
greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, 
of all painters whatsoever. I formed this faith 
(whether right or wrong matters at present nothing), 
in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret, under a roof 
covered with his pictures ; and of those pictures, three 
of the noblest were then in the form of shreds of rag- 
ged canvas, mixed up with the laths of the roof, rent 
through by three Austrian shells. Now it is not every 
lecturer who could tell you that he had seen three of 
his favorite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And 
after such a sight, it is not every lecturer who would 
tell you that, nevertheless, war was the foundation of 
all great art. 

Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful 
comparison of the states of great historic races at 
different periods. Merely to show you what I mean, 
I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of 
the advance of the best art of the world. The first 
dawn of it is in Egypt ; and the power of it is founded 
on the perpetual contemplation of death, and of future 
judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling 
caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The 
greatest works produced by them are sculptures of their 
kings going out to battle, or receiving the homage of 
conquered armies. And you must remember also, as 
one of the great keys to the splendor of the Egyptian 



WAR. 79 

nation, that the priests were not occupied in theology 
onl}^ Their theology was the basis of practical 
government and law, so that they were not so much 
priests as religious judges, the office of Samuel, among 
the Jews, being as nearly as possible correspondent 
to theirs. 

All the rudiments of art then, and much more than 
the rudiments of all science, are laid first by this great 
warrior-nation, which held in contempt all mechanical 
trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life of shep- 
herds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, 
where all poetry, and all painting, are nothing else 
than the description, praise, or dramatic representation 
of war, or of the exercises which prepare for it, in 
their connection with offices of religion. All Greek 
institutions had first respect to war ; and their concep- 
tion of it, as one necessary office of all human and 
divine life, is expressed simply by the images of their 
guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the 
intellect ; he bears the arrow and the bow, before he 
bears the lyre. Again, Athena is the goddess of all 
wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the 
shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is dis- 
tinguished from other deities. 

There were, however, two great differences in princi- 
ple between the Greek and the Egyptian theories of 
policy. In Greece there was no soldier caste ; every 
citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, again, while 



80 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

the Greeks rightly despised mechanical arts as much 
as the Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake 
of despising agricultural and pastoral life ; but per- 
fectly honored both. These two conditions of truer 
thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise 
manhood that has yet been reached ; for all our great 
arts, and nearly all our great thoughts, have been 
borrowed or derived from them. Take away from us 
what they have given ; and I hardly can imagine how 
low the modern European would stand. 

Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next 
phase of history, that though you must have war to 
produce art — ^you must also have much more than war ; 
namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people ; and 
that, though all the talent for painting in the world 
won't make painters of you, unless j^ou have a gift for 
fighting as well, you may have the gift for fighting, 
and none for painting. Kow, in the next great 
dynasty of soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. 
I have not yet investigated the Boman character 
enough to tell you the causes of this ; but I believe, 
paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however 
truly the Eoman might say of himself that he was 
born of Mars, and suckled by the wolf, he was never- 
theless, at heart, more of a farmer than a soldier. The 
exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical ; 
his poetry was in domestic life only, and the object of 
battle, " pacis imponere morem." And the arts are 



WAR. 81 

extinguished in his hands, and do not rise again, until, 
with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind 
of Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for the 
sake of war. And then, with the romantic knighthood 
which can imagine no other noble employment — under 
the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain ; and 
under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, 
art is born again, and rises to her height in the great 
valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through which there 
flows not a single stream, from all their Alps or 
Appennines, that did not once run dark red from 
battle: and it reaches its culminating glory in the city 
which gave to history the most intense type of soldier- 
ship yet seen among men ; the city whose armies were 
led in their assault by their king, led through it to 
victory by their king, and so led, though that king of 
theirs was blind, and in the extremity of his age. 

And from this time forward, as peace is established 
or extended in Europe, the arts decline. They reach 
an unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, 
enlist themselves at last on the side of luxury and 
various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil 
nations, wither utterly away; remaining only in 
partial practice among races who, like the French and 
us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live the 
lives, of soldiers. 

" It may be so," I can suppose that a philanthropist 
might exclaim. " Perish then the arts, if they can 



82 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

flourish only at such a cost. "What worth is there in 
toys of canvas and stone, if compared to the joy and 
peace of artless domestic life 1 " And the answer is — 
truly, in themselves, none. But as expressions of the 
highest state of the human spirit, their worth is in- 
finite. As results they may be worthless, but, as 
signs, they are above price. For it is an assured truth 
that, whenever the faculties of men are at their ful- 
ness, they must express themselves by art ; and to say 
that a state is without such expression, is to say that it 
is sunk from its proper level of manly nature. So 
that, when I tell you that war is the foundation of all 
the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the 
high virtues and faculties of men. 

It was very strange to me to discover this ; and 
very dreadful — but I saw it to be quite an undeniable 
fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues 
of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly 
untenable. Peace and the vices of civil life only 
flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, 
and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilization ; 
'but I found that those were not the words which the 
Muse of History coupled together : that on her lips, 
the words were — peace and sensuality, peace and 
selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and death. ] 
found, in brief, that all great nations learned their 
truth of word, and strength of thought, in war ; that 
they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace ; 



WAE. 83 

taught by war, and deceived by peace ; trained b}^ war, 
and betrayed by peace — in a word, that they were 
born in war and expired in peace. 

Yet, now note carefully, in the second place, it is not 
all war of which this can be said — nor all dragon's teeth, 
which, sown, will start up into men. It is not the 
ravage of a barbarian wolf-flock, as under Genseric or 
Suwarrow ; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of 
mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scotland : nor 
the occasional struggle of a strong peaceful nation for 
its life, as in the wars of the Swiss with Austria; nor 
the contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of 
power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or 
the just-terminated war in America. None of these 
forms of war builds anything but tombs. But the 
creative or foundational war is that in which the 
natural restlessness and love of contest among men 
are disciplined by consent, into modes of beautiful — 
though it may be fatal — play : in which the natural 
ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into 
the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in 
which the natural instincts of self-defense are sanctified 
by the nobleness of the institutions, and purity of the 
households, which they are appointed to defend. To 
such war as this all men are born ; in such war as this 
any man may happily die ; and forth from such war 
as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, 
all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity. 



84 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

I shall therefore divide the war of which I would 
speak to you into three heads. War for exercise or 
play ; war for dominion ; and, war for defense. 

I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of 
it primarily in this light, because, through all past his- 
tory, manly war has been more an exercise than any- 
thing else, among the classes who cause, and proclaim 
it. It is not a game to the conscript, or the pressed 
sailor; but neither of these is the causer of it. To 
the governor who determines that war shall be, and to 
the youths who voluntarily adopt it as their profession, 
it has always been a grand pastime ; and chiefly pur- 
sued because they had nothing else to do. And this is 
true without any exception, l^o king whose mind 
was fully occupied with the development of the inner 
resources of his kingdom, or with any other sufficing 
subject of thought, ever entered into war but on com- 
pulsion. No youth who was earnestly busy with any 
peaceful subject of study, or set on any serviceable 
course of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier. 
Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or busi- 
ness, in science or in literature, and he will never think 
of war otherwise than as a calamity. But leave him 
idle ; and, the more brave and active and capable he is 
by nature, the more he will thirst for some appointed 
field for action ; and find, in the passion and peril of 
battle, the only satisfying fulfillment of his unoccupied 
being. And from the earliest incipient civilization 



WAR. 85 

until now, the population of the earth divides itself, 
when you look at it widely, into two races ; one of 
workers, and the other of players — one tilling the 
ground, manufacturing, building, and otherwise pro- 
viding for the necessities of life ; the other part proudly 
idle, and continually therefore needing recreation, in 
which they use the productive and laborious orders 
partly as their cattle, and partly as their puppets or 
pieces in the game of death. 

[N'ow, remember, whatever virtue or godliness there 
may be in this game of war, rightly played, there is 
none when you thus play it with a multitude of small 
human pawns. 

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, 
choose to make your pastime of contest, do so, and 
welcome ; but set not up these unhappy peasant-pieces 
upon the green-fielded board. If the wager is to be 
of death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A 
goodly struggle in the Olympic dust, though it be the 
dust of the grave, the gods will look upon, and be with 
you in ; but they will not be with you, if you sit on 
the sides of the amphitheater, whose steps are the 
mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge 
your peasant millions into gladiatorial war. You also', 
you tender and dehcate women, for whom, and by 
whose command, all true battle has been, and must 
ever be ; you would perhaps shrink now, though you 
need not, from the thought of sitting as queens above 



86 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

set lists where the jousting game might be mortal 
How much more, then, ought you to shrink from 
the thought of sitting above a theater pit in 
which even a few condemned slaves Avere slaying 
each other only for your delight ! And do you 
not shrink from the fact of sitting above a theater^ 
pit, where — not condemned slaves — but the best 
and bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay 
each other — not man to man — as the coupled gladi- 
ators ; but race to race, in duel of generations ? You 
would tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see this ; 
and it is indeed true, that the women of Europe — those 
who have no heart-interest of their own at peril in the 
contest — draw the curtains of their boxes, and muffle 
the openings ; so that from the pit of the circus of 
slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a 
half -heard cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, 
when myriads of souls expire. They shut out the 
death-cries; and are happy, and talk wittily among 
themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our 
ladies do in their pleasant lives. 

ITay, you might answer, speaking for them — " We 
do not let these wars come to pass for our play, nor by 
our carelessness ; we cannot help them. How can any 
final quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by 
war ?" I cannot now delay, to tell you how political 
quarrels might be otherwise settled. But grant that 
they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be un- 



WAR. 87 

derstoocl by nations ; no law of justice submitted to by 
them : and tliat, while questions of a few acres, and 
of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, 
the questions which are to issue in the perishing or 
saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the 
truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. Grant 
this, and even then, judge if it will always be necessary 
for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your 
poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You 
would be ashamed to do this in your own private po- 
sition and power. Why should you not be ashamed 
also to do it in public place and power ? If you quar- 
rel with your neighbor, and the quarrel be indetermi- 
nable by law, and mortal, you and he do not send your 
footmen to Battersea fields to fight it but ; nor do you 
set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their goods. 
You fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your 
own danger, if at all. And you do not think it materi- 
ally affects the arbitrament that one of you has a larger 
household than the other ; so that, if the servants or 
tenants were brought into the field with their masters, 
the issue of the contest could not be doubtful ? You 
either refuse the private duel, or you practice it under 
laws of honor, not of physical force ; that so it may be, 
in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust 
conclusion of the private feud is of little moment, while 
the just or unjust conclusion of the public feud is of 
eternal moment : and yet, in this public quarrel, you 



88 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

take your servants' sons from their arms to fight for 
it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it ; 
and the black seals on the parchment of your treaties 
of peace are the deserted hearth and the fruitless field. 
There is a ghastly ludicrousness in this, as there is 
mostly in these wide and universal crimes. Hear the 
statement of the very fact of it in the most literal 
words of the greatest of our English thinkers : 

' ' What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is tlie net purport 
and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there 
dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some 
five hundred souls. From these, by certain ' natural enemies ' of 
the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, 
say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has 
suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, 
fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one 
can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can 
stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much 
weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and 
shipped away, at the public charge, some two thousand miles, or 
say only to the south of Spain ; and fed there till wanted. 

" And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty simi- 
lar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner 
wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into 
actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stand fronting Thirty, each with a 
gun in his hand. 

"Straightway the word 'Fire!' is given, and they blow the souls 
out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the 
world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anon shed 
tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the 
smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; 
nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by com- 



WAB. 89 

merce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Sim. 
pletoni their governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one 
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot." 
(Sartor Resartus ) 

Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must 
not, and shall not, ultimately be played this way. But 
should it be played any Avay ? Should it, if not by 
your servants, be practiced by yourselves? I think, 
yes. Both history and human instinct seem alike to 
say, yes. All healthy men like fighting, and like the 
sense of danger ; all brave women like to hear of their 
fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed 
instinct in the fine race of them ; and I cannot help 
fancying that fair fight is the best play for them ; and 
that a tournament was a better game than a steeple- 
chase. The time may perhaps come in France as well 
as here, for universal hurdle-races and cricketing : but 
I do not think universal " crickets " will bring out the 
best qualities of the nobles of either country. I use, 
in such question, the test which I have adopted, of the 
connection of war with other arts ; and I reflect how, 
as a sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to design a 
monument for a dead knight, in Westminster abbey, 
with a carving of a bat at one end, and a ball at the 
other. It may be the remains in me only of savage 
Gothic prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a 
shield at one end, and a sword at the other. And this 
observe, with no reference whatever to any story of 



90 THE CRO WN OF W1'£S^ OLIVE, 

duty done, or cause -defended. Assume the knight 
merely to have ridden out occasionally to fight his 
neiofhbor for exercise ; assume him even a soldier of 
fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his 
purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, 
somehow, grander and worthier in him to have made 
his bread by sword play than any other play ; I had 
rather he had made it by thrusting than by batting ; 
much more, than by betting. Much rather that he 
should ride war-horses, than back race-horses ; and — I 
say it sternly and deliberately — much rather would I 
have him slay his neighbor, than cheat him. 

But remember, so far as this may be true, the game 
of war is only that in which the full personal ^ower of 
the Jiibman creature is brought out in management of 
its weapons. And this for three reasons : 

First, the great justification of this game is that it 
truly when well played, determines who is the hest 
man ; who is the highest bred, the most self-denying, 
the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest of 
eye and hand. You cannot test these qualities wholly, 
unless there is a clear possibility of the struggle's end- 
ing in death. It is only in the fronting of that con- 
dition that the full trial of the man, soul and body, 
comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or 
of hurdles, or of cards, and any knavery that is in you 
may stay unchallenged all the while. But if the play 
may be ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a man 



I 



WAB. 91 

will probably make up his accounts a little before he 
enters it. Whatever is rotten and evil in him will 
weaken his hand more in holding a sword-hilt, than in 
balancing a bilhard-cue ; and on the whole, the habit 
of living lightly ' hearted, in daily presence of death, 
always has had, and must have, a tendency both to 
the making and testing of honest men. But for the 
final testing, observe, you must make the issue of 
battle strictly dependent on fineness of frame, and 
firmness of hand. You must not make it the question, 
which of the combatants has the longest gun, or which 
has got behind the biggest tree, or which has the wind 
in his face, or which has gunpowder made by the best 
chemists, or iron smelted with the best coal, or the 
angriest mob at his back. Decide your battle, 
whether of nations, or individuals, on those terms ; and 
you have only multiplied confusion, and added 
slaughter to iniquity. But decide your battle by pure 
trial which has the strongest arm, and steadiest heart 
— and you have gone far to decide a great many mat- 
ters besides, and to decide them rightly. 

And the other reasons for this mode of decision of 
cause, are the diminution both of the material de- 
structiveness, or cost, and of the, physical distress of 
war. For you must not think that in speaking to you 
in this (as you ma}^ imagine) fantastic praise of battle, 
I have overlooked the conditions weighing against me. 
I pray all of you, who have not read, to read with the 



92 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

most earnest attention, Mr. Helps' two essays on War 
and Government, in the first volume of the last series 
of "Friends in Council." Everything that can be 
urged against war is there simply, exhaustively, and 
most graphically stated. And all, there urged, is true. 
But the two great counts of evil alleged against war 
by that most thoughtful writer, hold only against mod- 
ern war. If you have to take away masses of men 
from all industrial employment — to feed them by the 
labor of others — to move them and provide them with 
destructive machines, varied daily in national rivalship 
of inventive cost ; if you have to ravage the country 
which you attack — to destroy for a score of future 
years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbors ; 
and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted 
by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those 
masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the frag- 
ments of living creatures, countlessly beyond all help 
of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of tort- 
ure, down into clots of clay — what book of accounts 
shall record the cost of your work; what book of 
judgment sentence the guilt of it ? 

That, I say, is modern war — scientific war — chem- 
ical and mechanic war, worse even than the savage's 
poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell me, perhaps, 
that any other war than this is impossible now. It 
may be so ; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be 
otherwise registered than by new facilities of destrqc- 



WAR. 93 

tion ; and the brotherly love of our enlarging Chris- 
tianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. 
Yet hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and 
ignorant days ; what war might yet be, if we could 
extinguish our science in darkness, and join the 
heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read 
you this from a book which probably most of you 
know well, and all ought to know — Muller's "Dori- 
ans ;" but I have put the points I wish you to remem- 
ber in closer connection than in his text. 

" The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta 
was great composure and subdued strength ; the vio- 
lence of Aristodemus and Isadas being considered as 
deserving rather of blame than praise; and these 
qualities in general distinguished the Greeks from 
the northern Barbarians, whose boldness always 
consisted in noise and tumult. For the same reason 
the Spartans sacrificed to the Muses before an action, 
these goddesses being expected to produce regularity 
and order in battle; as they sacrificed on the same 
occasion in Crete to the god of love, as the confirmer of 
mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a 
crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal 
for attack ; all the shields of the line glittered with 
their high polish, and mingled their splendor with the 
dark red of the purple mantles, which were meant 
both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood 
of the wounded ; to fall well and decorously being an 



94 '-^UE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

incentive the more to the most heroic valor. The 
conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high and 
noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes of 
brutal rage. The pursuit of the enemy ceased when 
the victory was completed ; and after the signal for 
retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The 
spoiling of arms, at least during tiie battle, was also 
interdicted ; and the consecration of the spoils of slain 
enemies to the gods, as, in general, all rejoicings for 
victory, were considered as ill omened." 

Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who 
prayed to heathen gods. What Christian war is, 
preached by Christian ministers, let any one tell you, 
who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred 
flute-playing, and was inspired and sanctified by the 
divinely-measured and musical language, of any North 
American regiment preparing for its charge. And 
what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian 
wars, let this one fact tell you — the Spartans won the 
decisive battle of Corinth Avith the loss of eight men ; 
the victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to the loss 
of 30,000. 

II. I pass now to our second order of war, the com- 
monest among men, that undertaken in desire of 
dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few 
moments what the real meaning of this desire of 
dominion is — first in the minds of kings — then in that 
of nations. 



WAR. 95 

l^ow, mind jou this first — that I speak either about 
kings or masses of men, with a fixed conviction that 
human nature is a noble and beautiful thing ; not a 
foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as 
their disease, not their nature ; as a folly which may 
be prevented, not a necessity which must be accepted. 
And my wonder, even when things are at their worst, 
is always at the height which this human nature can 
attain. Thinking it high, I find it always a higher 
thing than I thought it ; while those who think it low, 
find it, and will find it, always lower than they thought 
it : the fact being that it is infinite, and capable of in- 
finite height and infinite fall ; but the nature of it — 
and here is the faith which I would have you hold 
with me — the nature of it is in the nobleness, not in 
the catastrophe. 

Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the cap- 
tain of the " London " shook hands with his mate, 
saying " God speed you ! I will go down with my pas- 
sengers," that I believe to be "human nature." He 
does not do it from any religious motive — from any 
hope of reward, or any fear of punishment; he 
does it because he is a man. But when a mother, 
living among the fair fields of merry England, gives 
her two-year-old child to be suffocated under a mat- 
tress in her inner room, while the said mother 
waits and talks outside; that I believe to be not 
human nature. You have the two extremes there. 



96 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

shortly. And you men, and mothers, who are here 
face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to 
say which of these is human, and which inhuman 
which "natural" and which "unnatural?" Choose 
jour creed a-t once, I beseech you — choose it with 
unshaken choice — choose it forever. Will you take 
for foundation of act and hope, the faith that 
this man was such as God made him, or that this 
woman was such as God made her? Which of 
them has failed from their nature — from their pres- 
ent, possible, actual nature — not their nature of long 
ago, but their nature of noAv ? AVhich has be- 
trayed it, falsified it? Did the guardian who died 
in his trust, die inhumanly, and as a fool; and 
did the murderess of her child fulfill the law of 
her being ? Choose, I say ; infinitude of choices 
hang upon this. You have had false prophets 
among you — for centuries you have had them — 
solemnly warned against them though you were; 
false prophets, who have told you that all men 
are nothing but fiends or wolves, half beast, half 
devil. Believe that and indeed you may sink to 
that. But refuse that, and have faith that God 
"made you upright," though you have sought out 
many inventions; so, you will strive daily to be- 
come more what your Maker meant and means 
you. to be, and daily gives you also the power to 
be — and ^^ou will cling more and more to the 



WAB. 97 

nobleness and virtue that is in you, saying, "My 
righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go." 

I have put this to you as a choice, as if you 
might hold either of these creeds you liked best. 
But there is in reality no choice for you ; the 
facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no 
business to think about this matter, or to choose 
in it. The broad fact is, that a human creature 
of the highest race, and most perfect as a human 
thing, is invariably both kind and true; and that 
as you lower the race, you get cruelty and false- 
ness, as you get deformity : and this so steadily 
and assuredly, that the two great words which, in 
their first use, meant only perfection of race, have 
come, by consequence of the invariable connection 
of virtue with the fine human nature, both to sig- 
nify benevolence of disposition. The word gener- 
ous, and the word gentle, both, in their origin, 
meant only "of pure race," but because charity 
and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of 
blood, the words which once stood only for pride, 
now stand as synonyms for virtue. 

Now, this being the true power of our inherent 
humanity, and seeing that all the aims of education 
should be to develop this ; and seeing also what mag- 
nificent self-sacrifice the higher classes of men are 
CJ^pable of, for any cause that they understand or feel, 
it is wholly inconceivable to me how well-educated 



98 THE GROWN OF WILD OLl VE, 

princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the gentlest, 
and of all nobles the most generous, and whose title of 
royalty means only their function of doing every man 
" right " — how these, I say, throughout history, should 
so rarely pronounce themselves on the side of the poor 
and of justice, but continually maintain themselves 
and their own interests by oppression of the poor, and 
by wresting of justice; and how this should be ac- 
cepted as so natural, that the word loyalty, which 
means faithfulness to law, is used as if it Avere only 
the duty of a people to be loyal to their king, and not 
the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his 
people. How comes it to pass that a captain will die 
with his passengers, and lean over the gunwale to give 
the parting boat its course; but that a king will not 
usually die with, much less for, his passengers — thinks 
it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, 
to die for him f Think, I beseech you, of the wonder 
of this. The sea-captain, not captain by divine right, 
but only by compan3^'s appointment ; not a man of 
royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer; not 
with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble 
chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name being 
ever heard above the wash of the fatal waves ; not 
with the cause of a nation resting on his act, but help- 
less to save so much as a child from among the lost 
crowd with whom he resolves to be lost, yet g ^es 
down quietly to his grave, rather than break his faith 



WAR. 99 

to those few emigrants. But your captain by divine 
right — your captain with the hues of a hundred shields 
of kings upon his breast — your captain whose every 
deed, brave or base, will be illuminated or branded 
forever before unescapable eyes of men — your captain 
whose every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, 
from sunrising to setting, blessing as the sunshine, or 
shadowing as the night — this captain, as you find him in 
history, for the most part thinks only how he may tax 
his passengers, and sit at most ease in his state cabin ! 
For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of 
the rulers of great multitudes of men any such concep- 
tion of work for the good of those under their com- 
mand, as there is in the good and thoughtful masters of 
any small company of men, not only wars for the sake 
of mere increase of power could never take place, but 
our idea of power itself would be entirely altered. Do 
you suppose that to think and act even for a million of 
men, to hear their complaints, watch their weaknesses, 
restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead them, day 
by day, to purer life, is not enough for one man's work ? 
If any of us were absolute lord only of a district 
of a hundred miles square, and were resolved on doing 
our utmost for it ; making it feed as large a number of 
people as possible ; making every clod productive, and 
every rock defensive, and every human being happy ; 
should we not have enough on our hands think you ? 
But if the ruler has any other aim than this ; if, care- 



100 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

less of the result of his interference, he desire only the 
authority to interfere ; and, regardless of what is ill- 
done or well-done, cares only that it shall be done at 
his bidding ; if he would rather do two hundred miles' 
space of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of 
good, of course he will try to add to his territory ; and 
to add inimitably. But does he add to his power ? Do 
you call it power in a child, if he is allowed to play 
with the wheels and bands of some vast engine, 
pleased with their murmur and whirl, till his unwise 
touch, wandering where it ought not, scatters beam 
and wheel into ruin ? Yet what machine is so vast, so 
incognizable, as the working of the mind of a nation ; 
what child's touch so wanton, as the word of a selfish 
king? And yet, how long have we allowed the his- 
torian to speak of the extent of the calamity a man 
causes, as a just ground for his pride ; and to extol him 
as the greatest prince, who is only the center of the 
widest error. Follow out this thought by yourselves ; 
and you will find that all power, properly so-called, is 
wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a 
drifting fire-ship to destroy a fleet ; there may be 
venom enough in a dead body to infect a nation : but 
which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a 
drifting kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison- 
dipped scepter whose touch was mortal ? There is no 
true potency, remember, but that of help; nor true 
ambition, but ambition to save. 



WAE. 101 

And then, observe further, this true power, the 
power of saving, depends neither on multitude of men, 
nor on extent of territory. We are continually 
assuming that nations become strong according to 
their numbers. They indeed become so, if those 
numbers can be made of one mind ; but how are you 
sure you can stay them in one mipd, and keep them 
from having north and south minds? Grant them 
unanimous, how know you they will be unanimous in 
right? If they are unanimous in wrong, the more 
they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, suppose 
that they can neither be of one mind, nor of two 
minds, but can only be of no mind ? Suppose they are 
a mere helpless mob ; tottering into precipitant catas- 
trophe, like a wagon-load of stones when the wheel 
comes off. Dangerous enough for their neighbors, cer- 
tainly, but not " powerful." 

Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, 
any more than upon number of population. Take up 
your maps when you go home this evening — put the 
cluster of British Isles beside the mass of South 
America; and then consider whether any race of men 
need care how much ground they stand upon. The 
strength is in the men, and in their unity and virtue, 
not in their standing-room : a little group of wise 
hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools; and 
only that nation gains true territory, which gains itself. 

And now for the brief practical outcoinq of all tbi^. 



102 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

Remember, no government is ultimately strong, but in 
proportion to its kindness and Justice; and that a 
nation does not strengthen, by merely multiplying and 
diffusing itself. We have not strengthened as yet, by 
multiplying into America, l^ay, even ^vhen it has not 
to encounter the separating conditions of emigration, a 
nation need not boast itself of multiplying on its own 
ground, if it multiplies only as flies or locusts do, with 
the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its strength 
only by increasing as one great family, in perfect fel- 
lowship and brotherhood. And lastly, it does not 
strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom 
it cannot benefit. Austria is not strengthened, but 
weakened, by her grasp of Lombardy ; and whatever 
apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have 
accrued to us from the possession of India, whether 
these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, de- 
pends wholly on the degree in which our influence on 
the native race shall be benevolent and exalting. But, 
as it is at their own peril that any race extends their 
dominion in mere desire of power, so it is at their own 
still greater peril that they refuse to undertake ag- 
gressive war, according to their force, whenever they 
are assured that their authority would be helpful and 
protective. Nor need you listen to any sophistical ob- 
jection of the impossibility of knowing when a people's 
help is needed, or when not. Make your national con- 
science clean, and your national eyes will soon be clear. 



1 



WAR. 103 

No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble 
quarrel will ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in 
what cause, his aid is needed. I hold it my duty to 
make no political statement of any special bearing in 
this presence ; but I tell you broadly and boldly, that, 
within these last ten years, we English have, as a 
knightly nation, lost our spurs : we have fought where 
we should not have fought, for gain ; and we have 
been passive where we should not have been passive, 
for fear. I tell you that the principle of non-interven- 
tion, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel 
as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it 
only by being not only malignant, but dastardly. 

I know, however, that my opinions on this subject 
differ too widely from those ordinarily held, to be any 
further intruded upon you ; and therefore I pass lastly 
to examine the conditions of the third kind of noble 
war — war waged simply for defense of the country 
in which we were born, and for the maintenance and 
execution of her laws, by whomsoever threatened or de- 
fied. It is to this duty that I suppose most men entering 
the army consider themselves in reality to be bound, 
and I want you now to reflect what the laws of mere 
defense are; and what the soldier's duty, as now 
understood, or supposed to be understood. You have 
selemnly devoted yourselves to be English soldiers, for 
the guardianship of England. I want you to feel 
what this vow of yours indeed means, or is gradually 



104 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

coming to mean. You take it upon you, first, while 
you are sentimental school-boys; you go into your 
military convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into 
her convent while she is a sentimental school-girl; 
neither of you then know what you are about, though 
both the good soldiers and good nuns make the best of 
it afterward. You don't understand perhaps why I 
call you " sentimental " school-boys, when you go into 
the army ? Because, on the whole, it is love of advent- 
ure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the pride of 
fame, all which are sentimental motives, which 
chiefly make a boy like going into the Guards better 
than into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that 
there is a severe sense of duty mixed with these pea- 
cocky motives ^ And in the best of you, there is ; but 
do not think that it is principal. If you cared to do 
your duty to your country in a prosaic and unsenti- 
mental way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty 
to be done in raising harvests, than in burning them ; 
more in building houses, than in shelling them — more 
in winning money by 3^our own work, wherewith to 
help men, than in taxing other people's work, for 
money wherewith to slay men; more duty finally, 
in honest and unselfish living than in honest and un- 
selfish dying, though that seems to your boys' 
eyes the bravest. So far then, as for your own 
honor, and the honor of j^our families, you choose 
brave death in a red coat before brave life in a black 



WAR, 105 

one, you are sentimental; and now see what this 
passionate vow of 3^ours comes to. For a little while 
you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you shoot 
and are shot ; you are happy, and proud, always, and 
honored and wept if you die; and you are satisfied 
with your life, and with the end of it ; believmg, on 
the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes to 
others, and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of 
duty enters into your forming minds, the vow takes 
another aspect. You find that you have put your- 
selves into the hand of your country as a weapon. 
You have vowed to strike, when she bids you, and to 
stay scabbarded when she bids you ; all that you need 
answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp. And 
there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can 
trust the hand and heart of the Britomart who has 
braced you to her side, and are assured that when she 
leaves you sheathed in darkness, there is no need for 
your flash to the sun. But remember, good and noble 
as this state may be, it is a state of slavery. There are 
different kinds of slaves and different masters. Some 
slaves are scourged to their work by whips, others are 
scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It does 
not matter what the whip is ; it is none the less a 
whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of 
your own souls: the fact, so far, of slavery, is in 
being driven to your work without thought, at 
another's bidding. Again, some slaves are bought 



106 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

with money, and others with praise. It matters 
not what the purchase-money is. The distinguish- 
ing sign of slavery is to have a price, and be 
bought for it. Again, it matters not what kind 
of work you are set on; some slaves are set to 
forced diggings, others to forced marches; some 
dig furrows, others field-works, and others graves. 
Some press the juice of reeds, and some the juice 
of vines, and some the blood of men. The fact 
of the captivity is the same whatever work we 
are set upon, though the fruits of the toil may 
be different. But, remember, in thus vowing our- 
selves to be the slaves of any master, it ought to 
be some subject of forethought with us, what work 
he is likely to put us upon. You may think that 
the whole duty of a soldier is to be passive, that 
it is the country you have left behind who is to 
command, and you have only to obey. But are 
you sure that you have left all your country be- 
hind, or that the part of it you have so left is 
indeed the best part of it? Suppose — and, remem- 
ber, it is quite conceivable — that jou. yourselves 
are indeed the best part of England ; that you, 
who have become the slaves, ought to have been 
the masters; and that those who are the masters, 
ought to have been the slaves ! If it is a noble 
and whole-hearted England, whose bidding you are 
bound to do, it is well; but if you are yourselves 



WAR, 107 

the best of her heart, and the England you have 
left be but a half-hearted England, how say you 
of your obedience? You were too proud to be- 
come shopkeepers: are you satisfied then to become 
the servants of shopkeepers ? You were too proud to 
become merchants or farmers yourselves : will you 
have merchants or farmers then for your field 
marshals? You had no gifts of special grace for 
Exeter Hall: will you have some gifted person 
thereat for your commander-in-chief, to judge of 
your w^ork, and reward it ? You imagine yourselves 
to be the army of England : how if you should 
find yourselves, at last, only the police of her 
manufacturing towns, and the beadles of her little 
Bethels? 

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, forever; 
but what I want you to see, and to be assured 
of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not mere 
passive obedience and bravery; that, so far from 
this, no country is in a healthy state which has 
separated, even in a small degree, her civil from 
her military power. All states of the world, how- 
ever great, fall at once when they use mercenary 
armies; and although it is a less instant form of 
error (because involving no national taint of cow- 
ardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal — it 
is the error especially of modern times of which we 
cannot yet know all the calamitous consequences — Lg 



108 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

take away the best blood and strength of the nation, 
all the soul-substance of it that is brave, and careless 
of reward, and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust ; 
and to cast that into steel, and make a mere sword of 
it ; taking away its voice and will ; but to keep the 
worst part of the nation — whatever is cowardty, ava- 
ricious, sensual, and faithless — and to give to this the 
voice, to this the authority, to this the chief privilege, 
where there is least capacity, of thought. The fulfill- 
ment of your vow for the defense of England will by 
no means consist in carrying out such a system. You 
are not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a 
shop-door, to protect shop-boys who are cheating in- 
side. A soldier's vow to his country is that he will 
die for the guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her 
righteous laws, and of her any way challenged or en- 
dangered honor. A state without virtue, without laws, 
and without honor, he is houn^ not to defend; nay, 
bound to redress by his own right hand that which he 
sees to be base in her. So sternly is this the law of 
ISTature and life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can 
only be redeemed by a military despotism — never by 
talking, nor by its free effort. And the health of any 
state consists simply in this : that in it, those who are 
wisest shall also be strongest ; its rulers should be also 
its soldiers ; or, rather, by force of intellect more than 
of sword, its soldiers its rulers. Whatever the hold 
which the aristocracy of England has on the heart of 



I 



WAn. 109 

England, in that they are still always in front of her 
battles, this hold will not be enough, unless they are 
also in front of her thoughts. And truly her thoughts 
need good captain's leading now, if ever! Do you 
know what, by this beautiful division of labor (her 
brave men fighting, and her cowards thinking), she 
has come at last to think ? Here is a bit of paper 
in m}^ hand,* a good one too, and an honest one; 
quite representative of the best common public thought 
of England at this moment; and it is holding forth 
in one of its leaders upon our "social welfare," upon 
our "vivid life," upon the "political supremacy of 
Great Britain." And what do you think all these are 
owing to? To what our English sires have done for 
us, and taught us, age after age ? No : not to that. 
To our honesty of heart, or coolness of head, or steadi- 
ness of will? No: not to these. To our thinkers, or 

* I do not care to refer to tlie journal quoted, because the article 
was unworthy of its general tone, thougli in order to enable tlie audi- 
ence to verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on 
the table, when I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron 
Liebig's, quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in the 
Daily Telegraph of January 11, 1866, summarily digests and presents 
the maximum folly of modern thought in this respect. " Civiliza- 
tion," says the Baron, "is the economy of power, and English power 
is coal." Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is the 
making of civil persons, which is a kind of distillation of which 
alembics are incapable, and does not at all imply the turning of a 
small company of gentlemen into a large company of iron-mongers. 
And English power (what little of it may be left), is by no means 
coal, but, indeed, of that which, " when the whole world turns to 
coal, then chiefly lives." 



1 1 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

our statesmen, or our poets, or our captains, or our 
martyrs, or the patient labor of our poor ? No : not 
to these ; or at least not to these in any chief measure. 
Nay, says the journal, " more than any agency, it is 
the cheapness and abundance of our coal which have 
made us what we are." If it be so, then "ashes to 
ashes " be our epitaph ! and the sooner the better. I 
tell you, gentlemen of England, if ever you would 
have your country breathe the pure breath of heaven 
again, and receive again a soul into her body, instead 
of rotting into a carcass, blown up in the belly with 
carbonic acid (and great that way), you must think, and 
feel, for your England, as well as fight for her : you 
must teach her that all the true greatness she ever 
had, or ever can have, she won while her fields were 
green and her faces ruddy ; that greatness is still pos- 
sible for Englishmen, even though the ground be not 
hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over their 
heads ; and that, when the day comes for their country 
to lay her honors in the dust, her crest will not rise 
from it more loftily because it is dust of coal. Gen- 
tlemen, I tell you, solemnly, that the day is coming 
when the soldiers of England must be her tutors 
and the captains of her army, captains also of her 
mind. 

And now, remember, you soldier youths, who are 
thus in all ways the hope of your country ; or must be, 
if she have any hope : remember that your fitness for 



WAR. Ill 

all future trust depends upon what you are now. No 
good soldier in his old age was ever careless or indo- 
lent in his youth. Many a giddy and thoughtless boy 
has become a good bishop, or a good lawyer, or a good 
merchant; but no such an one ever became a good 
general. I challenge you, in all history, to find a 
record of a good soldier who was not grave and 
earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have no 
patience with people who talk about " the thoughtless- 
ness of youth" indulgently. I had infinitely rathei 
hear of thoughtless old age, and the indulgence due tc 
that. "When a man has done his work, and nothing 
can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him 
forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will ; but 
what excuse can you find for willfulness of thought, 
at the very time when every crisis of future fortune 
hangs on your decisions ? A youth thoughtless ! when 
all the happiness of his home forever depends on the 
chances, or the passions, of an hour ! A youth thought- 
less ! when the career of all his days depends on the 
opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless! 
when his every act is a foundation-stone of future con- 
duct, and every imagination a fountain of life or death ! 
Be thoughtless in any after-years, rather than now — 
though, indeed, there is only one place where a man 
may be nobly thoughtless — his death-bed. No think- 
ing should ever be left to be done there. 

Having, then, resolved that you will not waste reck- 



113 TEE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

lessly, but earnestly use, these early da3^s of yours, re- 
member that all the duties of her children to England 
may be summed in two words — industry, and honor. 
I say first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth 
are especially tempted to fail. Yet, surely, there is nc 
reason, because your life may possibly or probably be 
shorter than other men's, that you should therefore 
waste more recklessly the portion of it that is granted 
you ; neither do the duties of your profession, which 
require you to keep your bodies strong, in anywise in- 
volve the keeping of your minds weak. So far from 
that, the experience, the hardship, and the activity of 
a soldier's life render his powers of thought more 
accurate than those of other men; and while, for 
others, all knowledge is often little more than a means 
of amusement, there is no form of science which a 
soldier may not at some time or other find bearing on 
business of life and death. A young mathematician 
may be excused for languor in studying curves to be 
described only with a pencil ; but not in tracing those 
which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowl- 
edge of a wholesome herb may involve the feeding of 
an army ; and acquaintance with an obscure point of 
geoa^raphy, the success of a campaign. Kever waste 
an instant's time, therefore ; the sin of idleness is a 
thousandfold greater in you than in other youths ; for 
the fates of those who will one day be under your 
command hang upon your knowledge ; lost moments 



WAR. 113 

now will be lost lives then, and every instant which 
you carelessly take for play, you buy with blood. But 
there is one way of wasting time, of all the vilest, be- 
cause it wastes, not time only, but the interest and 
energy of your minds. Of all the ungentleraanly 
habits into which you can fall, the vilest is betting, or 
interesting yourselves in the issues of betting. It 
unites nearly every condition of folly and vice : you 
concentrate your interest upon a matter of chance, in- 
stead of upon a subject of true knowledge ; and you 
back opinions w^hich you have no grounds for forming, 
merely because they are your own. All the insolence 
of egotism is in this ; and so far as the love of excite- 
ment is complicated with the hope of winning money, 
you turn yourselves into the basest sort of tradesmen 
— those who live by speculation. Were there no other 
ground for industry, this would be a sufficient one ; 
that it protected you from the temptation to so 
scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and you will put 
yourselves in possession of a glorious and enlarging 
happiness ; not such as can be won by the speed of a 
horse, or marred by the obliquity of a ball. 

First, then, by industry you must fulfill your vow to 
your country ; but all industry and earnestness will be 
useless unless they are consecrated by your resolution 
to be in all things men of honor : not honor in the 
common sense only, but in the highest. Rest on the 
force of the two main words in the great verse, integer 



114 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

vitfB, ^gq\qv\s,(\uq ptivus. You have vowed your life to 
England ; give it her wholly — a bright, stainless, 
perfect life — a knightly life. Beca^ise you have to 
tight with machines instead of lances, there may be a 
necessity for more ghastly danger, but there is none 
for less worthiness of character, than in olden time. 
You may be true knights yet, though perhaps not 
eqitites / you may have to call yourselves " cannonry " 
instead of " chivalry," but that is no reason why you 
should not call yourselves true men. So the first thing 
you have to see to in becoming soldiers is that you 
make yourselves wholly true. Courage is a mere 
matter of course among any ordinarily well-born 
youths ; but neither truth nor gentleness is matter of 
course. You must bind them like shields about your 
necks ; you must write them on the tablets of your 
hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it 
of yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts 
are, if 3^ou leave them unstirred, as tombs in which a 
god lies buried. Yow yourselves crusaders to redeem 
that sacred sepalcher. And remember, before all 
things — for no other memory will be so protective of 
you — -that the highest law of this knightly truth is 
that under which it is vowed to women. Whomsoever 
else you deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever 
you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, 
nor leave unaided, according to your power, any 
woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of 



WAH. 115 

the higher phases of manly character begins in this — 
in truth and modesty before the face of all maidens ; 
in truth and pity, or truth and reverence, to all 
womanhood. 

And now let me turn for a moment to you — wives 
and maidens, who are the souls of soldiers; to you— 
mothers, who have devoted your children to the great 
hierarchy of Avar. Let me ask you to consider what 
part you have to take for the aid of those who love 
you ; for if you fail in your part they cannot fulfill 
theirs ; such absolute helpmates you are that no man 
can stand without that help, nor labor in his own 
strength. 

I know your hearts, and that the truth of them 
never fails when an hour of trial comes which you 
recognize for such. But you know not when the 
hour of trial first finds you, nor when it verily finds 
you. You imagine that you are only called upon 
to wait and to sufl^er; to surrender and to mourn. 
You know that you must not weaken the hearts 
of your husbands and lovers, even by the one fear 
of which those hearts are capable — the fear of 
parting from you, or of causing you grief. Through 
weary years of separation, through fearful expect- 
ancies of unknown fate; through the tenfold bit- 
terness of the sorrow which might so easily have 
been joy, and the tenfold yearning for glorious 
life struck down in its prime — through all these 



116 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But your 
trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is 
little — you are Englishwomen. To be heroic in 
change and sway of fortune is little — for do you 
not love ? To be patient through the great chasm 
and pause of loss is little — for do you not still love 
in heaven ? But to be heroic in happiness ; to bear 
yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling 
of the sunshine of morning; not to forget the God 
in whom you trust, when He gives you most ; not 
to fail those who trust you, when they seem to 
need you least ; this is the difficult fortitude. It is 
not in the pining of absence, not in the peril of 
battle, not in the wasting of sickness, that your 
prayer should be most passionate, or your guardian- 
ship most tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, for 
your young soldiers in the bloom of their pride; 
pray for them, while the only dangers round them 
are in their own wayward wills; watch you, and 
pray, when they have to face, not death but temp- 
tation. But it is this fortitude also for which there 
is the crowning reward. Believe me, the whole 
course and character of your lovers' lives is in your 
hands ; what you would have them be, they shall be, 
if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve 
to have them so ; for they are but mirrors in which 
you will see yourselves imaged. If you are frivo- 
lous, they will be so also; if you have no under- 



WAR. 117 

standing of the scope of their duty, they also will 
forget it; they will listen — they can listen — to no 
other interpretation of it than that uttered from 
your lips. Bid them be brave — they will be brave 
for you; bid them be cowards; and how noble so- 
ever they be — they will quail for you. Bid them 
be wise, and they will be wise for you; mock at 
their counsel, they will be fools for you: such and 
so absolute is your rule over them. You fancy, per- 
haps, as you have been told so often, that a wife's 
rule should only be over her husband's house, not 
over his mind. Ah, no! the true rule is just the 
reverse of that ; a true wife, in her husband's house, 
is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen. 
Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her 
part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it 
is hers to promise ; all that is dark in him she 
must purge into purity; all that is failing in him 
she must strengthen into truth: from her, through 
all the world's clamor, he must win his praise; in 
her, through all the world's warfare, he must find 
his peace. 

And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, 
perhaps, that I have spoken all this night in praise 
of war. Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one, would 
fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes that should 
beat swords into plowshares: and that this cannot 
be, is not the fault of us men. It is yoiir fault. 



118 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Wholly yours. Only by your command^ or by your 
permission, can any contest take place amon^ us. 
And the real, final, reason for all the poverty, misery, 
and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is simply that 
you women, however good, however religious, however 
self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish 
and too thoughtless to take pains for any creature out 
of your own immediate circles. You fanc}^ that you 
are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just tell you 
this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroof- 
ing peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, 
merely broke the china upon your own drawing-room 
tables, no war in civilized countries would last a week. 
I tell you more, that at whatever moment you choose 
to put a period to war, 3^ou could do it with less 
trouble than you take any day to go out to dinner. 
You know, or at least you might know if you would 
think, that every battle you hear of has made many 
widows and orphans. We have, none of us, heart 
enough truly to mourn with these. But at least we 
might put on the outer symbols of mourning with 
them. Let but every Christian lady who has con- 
science toward God, vow that she will mourn, at least 
outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is 
useless, and your church-going mere mockery of God, 
if you have not plain obedience in you enough for this. 
Let every lady in the upper classes of civilized Europe 
simply vow that, while any cruel war proceeds, she 



WAR, 119 

will wear Uach; a mute's black — with no jewel, no 
ornament, no excuse for, or evasion into, prettiness. 
I tell you again, no war would last a week. 

And lastly. You women of England are all now 
shrieking with one voice — you and your clergymen to- 
gether — because you hear of your Bibles being at- 
tacked. If you choose to obey your Bibles, you will 
never care who attacks them. It is just because you 
never fulfill a single downright precept of the Book, 
that you are so careful for its credit : and just because 
you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are 
so particular about the letters of them. The Bible 
tells you to dress plainly — and you are mad for finery ; 
the Bible tells you to have pity on the poor — and you 
crush them under your carriage- wheels ; the Bible tells 
you to do judgment and justice — and you do not know, 
nor care to know, so much as what the Bible word 
" justice '' means. Do but learn so much of God's 
truth as that comes to ; know what He means when 
He tells you to be just: and teach your sons, that 
their bravery is but a fool's boast, and their deeds iut 
a firebrand's tossing, unless they are indeed Just men, 
and Perfect in the Fear of God ; and you Avill soon 
have no more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed 
by Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it is also 
written, " In Righteousness He doth judge, and make 



i 



LECTURES ON ART. 

SEVEN LECTURES. 

1. mAUGUEAL. 

2. THE EELATIOI^ OF AET TO EELIGION 

3. THE EELATION OF AET TO MOEALS. 

4. THE EELATIOI^ OF AET TO USE. 

5. LINE. 

6. LIGHT. 

7. COLOE. 



Jl 



LECTUEE 1. 

INAUGURAL. 

The duty which is to-day laid on me, of introducing, 
among the elements of education appointed in this 
great university, one not only new, but such as to in- 
volve in its possible results some modification of the 
rest, is, as you well feel, so grave, that no man could 
undertake it without laying himself open to the impu- 
tation of a kind of insolence ; and no man could under- 
take it rightly, without being in danger of having his 
hands shortened by dread of his task, and mistrust of 
himself. 

And it has chanced to me, of late, to be so little ac- 
quainted either with. pride, or hope, that I can scarcely 
recover so much as I now need of the one for strength 
and of the other for foresight, except by remember- 
ing that noble persons, and friends of the high temper 
that judges most clearly where it loves best, have de- 
sired that this trust should be given me ; and by rest- 
ing also in the conviction that the goodly tree, whose 
roots, by God's help, we set in earth to-day, will not 
fail of its height because the planting of it is under 



124 LECTURES ON ART. 

poor auspices, or the first shoots of it enfeebled by ill 
gardening. 

2. The munificence of the English gentleman to 
whom we owe the founding of this professorship at 
once in our three great universities, has accomplished 
the lirst great group of a series of changes now taking 
gradual effect in our system of public education; and 
which, as you well know, are the sign of a vital change 
in the national mind, respecting both the principles on 
which that education should be conducted, and the 
ranks of society to which it should extend. For, 
whereas it was formerly thought that the discipline 
necessary to form the character of youth was best 
given in the study of abstract branches of literature 
and philosophy, it is now thought that the same, or a 
better, discipline may be given by informing men in 
early years of things it cannot but be of chief practical 
advantage to them afterward to know; and by permit- 
ting to them the choice of any field of study which 
they may feel to be best adapted to their personal dis- 
positions. I have always used vi^hat poor influence I 
possessed in advancing this change; nor can anyone 
rejoice more than I in its practical results. But the 
completion — I will not venture to say, correction — of 
a system established by the highest wisdom of noble 
ancestors, cannot be too reverently undertaken; and it 
is necessary for the English people, who are sometimes 
violent iu change in proportion to the reluctance with 



J 



INAXTQURAL. 125 

which they admit its necessity, to be now oftener than 
at other times reminded that the object of instruction 
here is not primarily attainment, but discipline ; and 
that a youth is sent to our universities, not (hitherto 
at least) to be apprenticed to a trade, nor even always 
to be advanced in a prof ession ; but, always, to be made 
a gentleman and a scholar. 

3. To be made these — if there is in him the making 
of either. The populace of all civilized countries have 
lately been under a feverish impression that it is possi- 
ble for all men to be both; and that having once 
become, by passing through certain mechanical pro- 
cesses of instruction, gentle and learned, they are sure 
to attain in the sequel the consummate beatitude of 
being rich. 

Kich, in the way and measure in which it is well 
for them to be so, they may, without doubt, all become. 
There is indeed a land of Havilah open to them, of 
which the wonderful sentence is literally true — "The 
gold of that land is good." But they must first under- 
stand, that education, in its deepest sense, is not the 
equalizer, but the discerner, of men ; and that, so far 
from being instruments for the collection of riches, the 
first lesson of wisdom is to disdain them, and of gen- 
tleness, to diffuse. 

It is not therefore, as far as we can judge, yet possi- 
ble for all men to be gentlemen and scholars. Even 
under the best training some will remain too selfish to 



126 LEVTITRKS ON ART. 

refuse wealth, and some too dull to desire leisure. But 
many more might be so than are now ; nay, perhaps all 
men in England might one day be so, if England truly 
desired her supremacy, among the nations to be in 
kindness and in learning. To which good end, it will 
indeed contribute that we add some practice of the 
lower arts to our scheme of university education ; but 
the thing which is vitally necessary is, that we should 
extend the spirit of university education to the prac- 
tice of the lower arts. 

4. And, above all, it is needful that we do this by 
redeeming them from their present pain of self-con- 
tempt, and by giving them rest. It has been too long 
boasted as the pride of England, that out of a vast 
multitude of men confessed to be in evil case, it was 
possible for individuals, by strenuous effort, and singu- 
lar good fortune, occasionally to emerge into the light 
and look back with self-gratulatory scorn upon the 
occupations of their parents, and the circumstances of 
their infancy. Ought we not rather to aim at an ideal 
of national life, when, of the employments of English- 
men, though each shall be distinct, none shall be un- 
happy or ignoble ; when mechanical operations 
acknowledged to be debasing in their tendency, shall 
be deputed to less fortunate and more covetous races ; 
when advance from rank to rank, though possible to 
all men, may be rather shunned than desired by the 
best; and the chief object in the mind of every citizen 



INAUGURAL, 127 

may not be extrication from a condition admitted to 
be disgraceful, but fulfillment of a duty which shall be 
also a birthright ? 

5. And then, the training of all these distinct classes 
will not be by universities of all knowledge, but by 
distinct schools of such knowledge as shall be most 
useful for every class : in which, first the principles of 
their special business may be perfectly taught, and 
whatever higher learning, and cultivation of the facul- 
ties for receiving and giving pleasure, may be properly 
joined with that labor, taught in connection with it. 
Thus, I do not despair of seeing a School of Agricul- 
ture, with its fully endowed institutes of zoology, bot- 
any, and chemistry; and a School of Mercantile 
Seamanship, with its institutes of astronomy, meteor- 
ology, and natural history of the sea : and, to name only 
one of the finer, I do not say higher, arts, we shall, I 
hope, in a little time, have a perfect school of metal- 
work, at the head of which will be, not the ironmas- 
ters, but the goldsmiths ; and therein, I believe, that 
artists, being taught how to deal wisely with the most 
precious of metals, will take into due government the 
uses of all others; having in connection with their 
practical work splendid institutes of chemistry and 
mineralogy, and of ethical and imaginative literature. 

And thus I confess myself more interested in the 
final issue of the change in our system of central edu- 
cation, which is to-day consummated by the admission 



128 LECTURES ON ART, 

of the manual arts into its scheme, than in any direct 
effect likely to result upon ourselves from the innova- 
tion. But I must not permit myself to fail in the esti- 
mate of my immediate duty, while I debate what that 
duty may hereafter become in the hands of others ; 
and I will therefore now, so far as I am able, lay be 
fore you a brief general view of the existing state of 
the arts in England, and of the influence which her 
universities, through these newly -founded lectureships, 
may, I think, bring to bear upon it for good. 

6. And first, we have to consider the impulse 
which has been given to the practice of all the arts of 
which the object is the production of beautiful things, 
by the extension of our commerce, and of the means 
of intercourse with foreign nations, by which we now 
become more familiarly acquainted with their works 
in past and in present times. The immediate result of 
this new knowledge has been, I regret to say, to make 
us more jealous of the genius of others, than conscious 
of the limitations of our own ; and to make us rather 
desire to enlarge our wealth by the sale of art, than to 
elevate our enjoyments by its acquisition. 

Now, whatever efforts we make, with a true desire 
to produce, and possess, as themselves a constituent 
part of true wealth, things that are intrinsically beau- 
tiful, have in them at least one of the essential ele- 
ments of success. But efforts having origin only in 
the hope of enriching ourselves by the sale of our 



I 



INAUGURAL. 129 

productions, are assuredly condemned to dishonorable 
failure ; not because, ultimately a well-trained nation 
may not profit by the exercise of its peculiar art-skill ; 
but because that peculiar art-skill can never be devel- 
oped with a view to profit. The right fulfillment of 
national power in art depends always on the direction 
of its aim by the experience of ages. Self-knowledge 
is not less difficult, nor less necessary for the direction 
of its genius, to a people than to an individual, and it 
is neither to be acquired by the eagerness of unprac- 
tised pride, nor during the anxieties of improvident 
distress. No nation ever had, or will have, the 
power of suddenly developing, under the pressure of 
necessity, faculties it had neglected when it was at 
ease ; nor of teaching itself in poverty, the skill to pro- 
duce, what it has never in opulence had the sense to 
admire. 

7. Connected also with some of the worst parts of 
our social system, but capable of being directed to 
better result than this commercial endeavor, we see 
lately a most powerful impulse given to the produc- 
tion of costly works of art by the various causes which 
promote the sudden accumulation of wealth in the 
hands of private persons. We have thus a vast and 
new patronage, which, in its present agency, is in- 
jurious to our schools ; but which is nevertheless In a 
great degree earnest and conscientious, and far from 
being influenced chiefly by motives of ostentation. 



130 LECTURES ON ART, 

Most ot our rich men would be glad to promote the 
true interests of art in this country ; and even those 
who buy for vanity, found their vanity on the posses- 
sion of what they suppose to be best. 

It is therefore in a great measure the fault of artists 
themselves if they suffer from this partly unintelli- 
geDt, but thoroughl}?- well-intended patronage. If 
they seek to attract it by eccentricity, to deceive it 
by superficial qualities, or take advantage of it by 
thoughtless and facile production, they necessarily de- 
grade themselves and it together, and have no right to 
complain afterward that it will not acknowledge 
better-grounded claims. But if every painter of real 
power would do only what he knew would be worthy 
of himself, and refuse to be involved in the conten- 
tion for undeserved or accidental success, there is 
indeed, whatever may have been thought or said to 
the contrarv, true instinct enough in the public mind 
to follow such firm guidance. It is one of the facts 
Avhich the experience of thirty years enables me to as; 
sert without qualification, that a really good picture 
is ultimately always approved and bought, unless it is 
willfully rendered offensive to the public by faults 
which the artist has been either too proud to abandon, 
or too weak to correct. 

8. The development of whatever is healthful and 
serviceable in the two modes of impulse which we 
have been considering, depends however, ultimately, 



mAUQljRAL. 131 

on the direction taken by the true interest in art which 
has lately been aroused by the great and active genius 
of many of our living, or but lately lost, painters, 
sculptors, and architects. It may perhaps surprise 
but I think it will please you to hear me, or (if you 
will forgive me, in my own Oxford, the presumption of 
fancying that some may recognize me by an old name) 
to hear the author of '' Modern Painters" say, that his 
chief error in earlier days was not in over-estimating, 
but in too slightly acknowledging the merit of living 
men. The great painter whose power, while he was yet 
among us, I was able to perceive, was the first to re- 
prove me for my disregard of the skill of his fellow- 
artists ; and, with this inauguration of the study of 
the art of all time — a study which can only by true 
modesty end in wise admiration — it is surely well that 
I connect the record of these words of his, spoken then 
too truly to myself and true always more or less for all 
who are untrained in that toil — ^' You don't know how 
difficult it is." 

You will not expect me, within the compass of this 
lecture, to give you any analysis of the many kinds of 
excellent art (in all the three great divisions) Avhich 
the complex demands of modern life, and yet more 
varied instincts of modern genius, have developed for 
pleasure or service. It must be my endeavor, in con- 
junction with my colleagues in other universities, 
hereafter to enable you to appreciate these worthily ; 



132 LWTUMES ON ART, 

in the hope that also the members in the Eoyal Acad 
emy, and those of the Institute of British Architects, 
may be induced to assist, and guide, the efforts of the 
universities, by organizing such a system of art educa- 
tion for their own students as shall in future prevent 
the waste of genius in any mistaken endeavors ; 
especially removing doubt as to the proper substance 
and the use of materials; and requiring compliance 
with certain elementary principles of right, in every 
picture and design exhibited with their sanction. It 
is not indeed possible for talent so varied as that of 
English artists to be compelled into the formalities of 
a determined school; but it must certainly be the 
function of every academical body to see that their 
younger students are guarded from what must in 
every school be error ; and that they are practised in 
the best methods of work hitherto known, before 
their ingenuity is directed to the invention of others. 
9. I need scarcely refer, except for the sake of com- 
pleteness in my statement, to one form of demand for 
art which is wholly unenlightened, and powerful only 
for evil : namely, the demand of the classes occupied 
solely in the pursuit of pleasure, for objects and 
modes of art that can amuse indolence or satisfy sensi- 
bility. There is no need for any discussion of these 
requirements, or of their forms of influence, though 
they are very deadly at present in their operation on 
sculpture, and on jewelers' work. They cannot be 



I 



INAUGURAL. 133 

checked by blame, nor guided by instruction; they 
are merely the necessary results of whatever defects 
exist in the temper and principles of a luxurious 
society ; and it is only by moral changes, not by art- 
criticism, that their action can be modified. 

10. Lastly, there is a continually increasing demand 
for popular art, multipliable by the printing press, 
illustrative of daily events, of general literature, and of 
natural science. Admirable skill, and some of the best 
talent of modern times, are occupied in supplying this 
want ; and there is no limit to the good which may be 
effected by rightly taking advantage of the powers we 
now possess of placing good and lovely art within the 
reach of the poorest classes. Much has been already 
accomplished ; but great harm has been done also — 
first, by forms of art definitely addressed to depraved 
tastes ; and, secondly, in a more subtile way, by really 
beautiful and useful engravings which are yet not good 
enough to retain their influence on the public mind ; 
which weary it by redundant quantity of monotonous 
average excellence, and diminish or destroy its power 
of accurate attention to work of a higher order. 

Especially this is to be regretted in the effect pro- 
duced on the schools of line engraving, which had 
reached in England an executive skill of a kind before 
unexampled, and which of late have lost much of their 
more sterling and legitimate methods. Still, I 
have seen plates produced quite recently, more beauti- 



134 LECTURES ON ART. 

ful, I think, in some qualities than anything ever be- 
fore attained by the burin • and I have not the shght- 
est fear that photography, or any other adverse or 
competitive operation, will in the least ultimately 
diminish, — 1 believe they will, on the contrary, stimu- 
late and exalt — the grand old powers of the wood 
and the steel. 

11. Such are, I think, briefly the present conditions 
of art with which we have to deal ; and I conceive it to 
be the function of this professorship, with respect to 
them, to establish both a practical and critical school 
of fine art for English gentlemen ; practical, so that if 
they draw at all, they may draw rightly ; and critical, 
so that they may both be directed to such works of 
existing art as will best reward their study; and en- 
abled to malie the exercise of their patronage, if living 
artists delightful to themselves by their consciousness 
of its justice, and, to the utmost, beneficial to their 
country, by being given only to the men who deserve 
it ; and, to those, in the early period of their lives, 
when they both need it most, and can be influenced by 
it to the best advantage. 

12. And especially with reference to this function 
of patronage, I believe myself justified in taking into 
account future probabilities as to the character and 
range of art in England ; and I shall endeavor at once 
to organize with you a system of study calculated to 
develop chiefly the knowledge of those branches in 



INAUGURAL, 135 

which the English schools have shown, and are likely 
to show, peculiar excellence. Now, in asking your 
sanction both for the nature of the general plans I 
wish to adopt, and for what I conceive to be necessary 
limitations of them, I wish you to be fully aware of 
my reasons for both; and I will therefore risk the 
burden of your patience while I state the directions of 
effort in which I think English artists are liable to 
failure, and those also in which past experience has 
shown they are secure of success. 

13. I referred, but now, to the effort we are mak- 
ing to improve the designs of our manufactures. 
Within certain limits I believe this improvement may 
indeed take effect ; so that we may no more humor 
momentar}^ fashions by ugly results of chance instead 
of design ; and may produce both good tissues, of har- 
monious colors, and good forms and substance of pot- 
tery and glass. But we shall never excel in decorative 
design. Such design is usually produced by people of 
great natural powers of mind, who have no variety of 
subjects to employ themselves on, no oppressive 
anxieties, and are in circumstances, either of natural 
scenery or of daily life, which cause pleasurable ex- 
citement. We cannot design because we have too 
much to think of, and we think of it too anxiously. 
It has long been observed how little real anxiety ex- 
ists in the minds of the partly savage races which ex- 
cel in decorative art ; and we must not suppose that 



136 LECTURES ON ART, 

the temper of the middle ages was a troubled one, be- 
cause every day brought its dangers or its changes. 
The very eventfulness of the life rendered it careless, 
as generally is still the case with soldiers and sailors. 
Now, when there are great powers of thought, and 
little to think of, all the waste energy and fancy are 
thrown into the manual work, and you have as much 
intellect as would direct the affairs of a large mercan- 
tile concern for a day, spent all at once, quite uncon- 
sciously, in drawing an ingenions spiral. 

Also, powers of doing fine ornamental work are 
only to be reached by a perpetual discipline of the 
hand as well as of the fanc}^ ; discipline as attentive 
and painful as that which a juggler has to put him- 
self through, to overcome the more palpable difficul- 
ties of his profession. The execution of the best artists 
is always a splendid tour-de-force and much that in 
painting is supposed to be dependent on material is in- 
deed only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. 
Now, when powers of fancy, stimulated by this 
triumphant precision of manual dexterity, descend un- 
interruptedly from generation to generation, you have 
at last, what is not so much a trained artist as a new 
species of animal, with whose instinctive gifts you 
have no chance of contending. And thus all our imi- 
tations of other peoples' work are futile. We must 
learn first to make honest English wares, and after- 
ward to decorate them as may please the then approv- 
ing Graces. 



INAUGURAL. I37 

14. Secondly — and this is an incapacity of a graver 
kind, yet having its own good in it also — we shall 
never be successful in the highest fields of ideal or 
theological art. For there is one strange, but quite 
essential, character in us; ever since the Conquest, if 
not earlier : a delight in the forms of burlesque which 
are connected in some degree with the foulness in evil., 
I think the most perfect type of a true English mind 
in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer ; and 
you will find that, while it is for the most part full of 
thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of an April 
morning, there are even in the midst of this, some- 
times momentarily jesting passages which stoop to 
play with evil— while the power of listening to and 
enjoying the jesting of entirely gross persons, what- 
ever the feeling may be which permits it, afterward 
degenerates into forms of humor which render some 
of quite the greatest, wisest, and most moral of Eng- 
lish writers now almost useless for our youth. And 
yet you will find that whenever Englishmen are wholly 
without this instinct, their genius is comparatively 
weak and restricted. 

15. Now, the first necessity for the doing of any 
great work in ideal art, is the looking upon all foul- 
ness with horror, as a contemptible though dreadful 
enemy. You may easil};- understand what I mean, by 
comparing the feelings with which Dante regards any 
form of obscenity or of base jest, with the temper in 



138 LECTURES ON ART, 

which the same things are regarded by Shakespeare. 
And this strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it 
is, in our good men, with great simplicity and common 
sense, renders them shrewd and perfect observers and 
delineators of actual nature low or high ; but pre- 
cludes them from that speciality of art which is prop- 
erly called sublime. If ever we try anything in the 
manner of Michael Angelo or of Dante, we catch a 
fall, even in literature, as Milton in the battle of the 
angels, spoiled from Hesiod : while in art, every at- 
tempt in this style has hitherto been the sign either of 
the presumptuous egotism of persons who had never 
really learned to be workmen, or it has been connected 
with very tragic forms of the contemplation of death, 
it has always been partly insane, and never once 
wholly successful. 

But we need not feel any discomfort in these limit- 
ations of our capacity. We can do much that others 
cannot, and more than we have ever yet ourselves 
completely done. Our first great gift is in the por- 
traiture of living people — a power already so accom- 
plished in both Keynolds and Gainsborough, that noth- 
ing is left for future masters but to add the calm of 
perfect workmanship to their vigor and felicity of 
perception. And of what value a true school of por- 
traiture may become in the future, when worthy men 
will desire only to be known, and others will not fear 
to know them for what they truly were, we cannot 



INAUGURAL. 139 

from any past records of art influence yet conceive. 
But in my next address it will be partly my endeavor 
to show you how much more useful, because more 
humble, the labor of great masters might have been, 
had they been content to bear record of the souls that 
were dwelling with them on earth, instead of striving 
to give a deceptive glory to those they dreamed of in 
heaven. 

16. Secondly, we have an intense power of inven- 
tion and expression in domestic drama (King Lear 
and Hamlet being essentially domestic in their 
strongest motives of interest). There is a tendency at 
this moment toward a noble development of our art 
in this direction, checked by many adverse conditions 
which may be summed in one — the insufficiency of 
generous civic or patriotic passion in the heart of the 
English people ; a fault which makes its domestic af- 
fections selfish, contracted, and, therefore, frivolous. 

17. Thirdly, in connection with our simplicity, and 
good-humor, and partly with that very love of the 
grotesque which debases our ideal, we have a sympa- 
thy with the lower animals which is peculiarly our 
own ; and which, though it has already found some 
exquisite expression in the works of Bewick and Land- 
seer, is yet quite undeveloped. This sympathy, with 
the aid of our now authoritative science of physiology, 
and in association with our British love of adventure, 
will, I hope, enable us to give to the future inhabitant^ 



140 LECTURES ON ART. 

of the globe an almost perfect record of the present 
forms of animal life upon it, of which many are on 
the point of being extinguished. 

Lastly, but not as the least important of our special 
powers, I have to note our skill in landscape, of which 
I will presently speak more particularly. 

18. Such, I conceive to be the directions in which 
principally, we have the power to excel ; and you 
must at once see how the consideration of them must 
modify the advisable methods of our art study. For 
if our professional painters were likely to produce 
pieces of art loftily ideal in their character, it would 
be desirable to form the taste of the students here by 
setting before them only the purest examples of 
Greek, and the mightiest of Italian art. But I do not 
think you will yet lind a single instance of a school 
directed exclusively to these higher branches of study 
in England, which has strongly, or even definitely, made 
impression on its younger scholars. While, therefore, 
I shall endeavor to point out clearly the characters to 
be looked for and admired in the great masters of 
imaginative design, I shall make no special effort to 
stimulate the imitation of them ; and, above all things, 
I shall try to probe in 3^ou, and to prevent, the affecta- 
tion into which it is easy to fall, even through mod- 
esty — of either endeavoring to admire a grandeur with 
which we have no natural sympathy, or losing the 
pleasure we might take in the study of familiar things, 



tNAVGURAL. 141 

by considering it a sign of refinement to look for what 
is of higher class, or rarer occurrence. 

19. Again, if our artisans were likely to attain any 
distinguished skill in ornamental design, it would be 
incumbent upon me to make my class here accurately 
acquainted with the principles of earth and metal 
work, and to accustom them to take pleasure in con- 
ventional arrangements of color and form. I hope, 
indeed, to do this, so far as to enable them to discern 
the real merit of many styles of art which are at 
present neglected ; and, above all, to read the minds 
of semi-barbaric nations in the only language by 
which their feelings were capable of expression : and 
those members of my class whose temper inclines 
them to take pleasure in the interpretation of mythic 
symbols, will not probably be induced to quit the pro- 
found fields of investigation which early art, exam- 
ined carefully, will open to them, and which belong to 
it alone ; for this is a general law, that, supposing the 
intellect of the workman the same, the more imitative- 
ly complete his art, the less he will mean by it ; and 
the ruder the symbol, the deeper is' its intention. 
Nevertheless, when I have once sufficiently pointed 
out the nature and value of this conventional work, 
and vindicated it from the contempt with which it is 
too generally regarded, I shall leave the student to 
his own pleasure in its pursuit ; and even, so far as I 
may, discourage all admiration founded on quaintness 



142 LECTURES ON ART, 

or peculiarity of st\4e ; and repress any other modes 
of feeling which are likely to lead rather to fastidious 
collection of curiosities, than to the intelligent appre- 
ciation of work, which being executed in compliance 
with constant laws of right, cannot be singular, and 
must be distinguished only by excellence in what is 
always desirable. 

20. While, therefore, in these and such other direc- 
tions, I shall endeavor to put every adequate means of 
advance within reach of the members of my class, I 
shall use my own best energy to show them what is 
consummately beautiful and well done, by men who 
have passed through the symbolic or suggestive stage 
of design, and have enabled themselves to comply, 
by truth of representation, with the strictest or most 
eager demands of accurate science, and of disciplined 
passion. I shall therefore direct your observa- 
tion, during the greater part of the time you 
may spare to me, to what is indisputably 
best, both in painting and sculpture ; trusting 
that you will afterward recognize the nascent 
and partial skill of former days both with greater 
interest and greater respect, when you know the full 
difficulty of what it attempted, and the complete 
range of what it foretold. 

21. And with this view, I shall at once endeavor to 
do what has for many years been in my thoughts, and 
now, with the advice and assistance of the curators of 



INAUGURAL. 14B 

the university galleries, I do not doubt may be accom- 
plished here in Oxford, just where it will be pre-em- 
inently useful — namely, to arrange an educational 
series of examples of excellent art, standards to which 
you may at once refer on any questionable point, and 
by the study of which you may gradually attain an 
instinctive sense of right, which will afterward be 
liable to no serious error. Such a collection may be 
formed, both more perfectly, and more easily, than 
would commonly be supposed. For the real utility of 
the series will depend on its restricted extent — on 
the severe exclusion of all second-rate, superfluous, or 
even attractively varied examples — and on the confin- 
ing the students' attention to a few types of what is 
insuperably good. More progress in power of judg- 
ment may be made in a limited time by the examina- 
tion of one work, than by the review of many ; and 
a certain degree of vitality is given to the impressive- 
ness of every characteristic, by its being exhibited in 
clear contrast, and without repetition. 

The greater number of the examples I shall choose 
will at first not be costly ; many of them, only engrav- 
ings or photographs ; they shall be arranged so as to 
be easily accessible, and I will prepare a catalogue 
pointing out my purpose in the selection of each. But 
in process of time, I have good hope that assistance 
will be given me by the English public in making the 
series here no less splendid than serviceable; and in 



144 LECTURES ON ART 

placing minor collections, arranged on a similar prin- 
ciple, at the command also of the students in our pub- 
lic schools. 

22. In the second place, I shall endeavor to prevail 
upon all the younger members of the university who 
wish to attend the art lectures, to give at least so 
much time to manual practice as may enable them to 
understand the nature and difficulty of executive skill. 
The time so spent will not be lost, even as regards 
their other studies at the university, for I will prepare 
the practical exercises in a double series, one illustra- 
tive of history, the other of natural science. And 
whether you are drawing a piece of Greek armor, or a 
hawk's beak, or a lion's paw, you will find that the 
mere necessity of using the hand compels attention to 
circumstances which would otherwise have escaped 
notice, and fastens them in the memory without far- 
ther effort. But were it even otherwise, and this 
practical training did really involve some sacrifice of 
your time, I do not fear but that it will be justified to 
you by its felt results : and I think that general public 
feeling is also tending to the admission that accom- 
plished education must include, not only full com- 
mand of expression by language, but command of true 
musical sound by the voice, and of true form by the 
hand. 

23. While I myself hold this professorship, I shall 
direct you in these exercises very definitely to natural 



' INAUGURAL. 145 

history, and to landscape ; not only because in these 
two branches I am probably able to show you truths 
which might be despised by my successors; but be- 
cause I think the vital and joyful study of natural his- 
tory quite the principal element requiring introduction 
not only into university, but into national education, 
from highest to lowest ; and I even will risk incurring 
your ridicule by confessing one of my fondest dreams, 
that I may succeed in making some of you English 
youths like better to look at a bird than to shoot it ; 
and even desire to make wild creatures tame, instead 
of tame creatures wild. And for the study of land- 
scape, it is, I think, now calculated to be of use in 
deeper, if not more important modes, than that of nat- 
ural science, for reasons which I will ask you to let me 
state at some length. 

24. Observe first — no race of men which is entirely 
bred in wild country, far from cities, ever enjoys land- 
scape. They may enjoy the beauty of animals, but 
scarcely even that: a true peasant cannot see the beaut}^ 
of cattle ; but only the qualities expressive of their ser- 
viceableness. I waive discussion of this to-day ; permit 
my assertion of it, under my confident guarantee of 
future proof. Landscape can only be enjoyed by culti- 
vated persons and it is only by music, literature and 
painting, that cultivation can be given. Also the fac- 
ulties which are thus received are hereditary ; so that 
the child of an educated race has an innate instinct for 



146 LECTURES ON ART, 

beauty, derived from arts practiced hundreds of years 
before its birth. Now farther note this, one of the 
loveliest things in human nature. In the children of 
noble races, trained by surrounding art, and at the 
same time in the practice of great deeds, there is an 
intense delight in the landscape of their country as 
memorial ; a sense not taught to them, nor teachable 
to any others ; but, in them, innate ; and the seal and 
reward of persistence in great national life ; — the obe- 
dience and the peace of ages having extended gradually 
the glory of the revered ancestors also to the ancestral 
land ; until the motherhood of the dust, the myster}^ 
of the Demeter from whose bosom we came, and to 
whose bosom we return, surrounds and inspires, 
every where, the local awe of field and fountain; the 
sacredness of landmark that none may remove, and of 
wave that none may pollute ; while records of proud 
days, and of dear persons, make every rock monu- 
mental with ghostly inscription, and every path lovely 
with noble desolateness. 

25. Now, however, checked by lightness of tem- 
perament, the instinctive love of landscape in us has 
this deep root, which, in your minds, I will pray you 
to disencumber from whatever may oppress or mortify 
it, and to strive to feel with all the strength of your 
youth that a nation is only worthy of the soil and the 
scenes that it has inherited, when, by all its acts and 
arts, it is making them more lovely for its children. 



INAUGtinAL. 147 

And now, I trust, you will feel that it is not in 
mere yielding to my own fancies that I have chosen, 
for the first three subjects in your educational series, 
landscape scenes — two in England, and one in France 
— the association of these not being without purpose ; 
and for the fourth, Albert Diirer's dream of the spirit 
of Labor. And of the landscape subjects, I must tell 
you this much. The first is an engraving only ; the 
original drawing by Turner was destroyed by fire 
twenty years ago. For which loss I wish you to be 
sorry, and to remember, in connection with this first 
example, that whatever remains to us of possession in 
the arts is, compared to what we might have had if we 
had cared for them, just what that engraving is to the 
lost drawing. You will find also that its subject has 
meaning in it which will not be harmful to you. The 
second example is a real drawing by Turner, in the 
same series, and very nearly of the same place ; the 
two scenes are within a quarter of a mile of each 
other. It will show you the character of the work 
that was destroyed. It will show you, in process of 
time, much more; but chiefly, and this is my main 
reason for choosing both, it Avill be a permanent ex- 
pression to you of what English landscape was once; 
and must, if we are to remain a nation, be again. 

I think it farther right to tell you, for otherwise 
you might hardly pay regard enough to work appar- 
ently so simple, that by a chance which is not al- 



148 LECTURES ON AUT, 

together displeasing to me, this drawing, which it has 
become, for these reasons, necessary for me to give 
you, is — not indeed the best I have (I have several as 
good, though none better) — but, of all I have, the one 
I had least mind to part with. 

The third example is also a Turner drawing — a 
scene on the Loire — never engraved; It is an intro- 
duction to the series of the Loire, which you have 
already ; it has in its present place a due concurrence 
with the expressionable purpose of its companions; 
and though small, it is very precious, being a faultless, 
and, I believe, unsurpassable example of water -color 
painting. 

Chiefly, however, remember the object of these 
three first examples is to give you an index to your 
truest feelings about European, and especially about 
your native landscape, as it is pensive and historical ; 
and so far as you yourselves make any effort at its rep- 
resentation, to give you a motive for fidelity in 
handwork more animating than any connected with 
mere success in the art itself. 

26. With respect to actual methods of practice I 
will not incur the responsibility of determining them 
for you. We will take Lionardo's treatise on train- 
ing for our first text-book ; and I think you need not 
fear being misled by me if I ask you to do only what 
Lionardo bids, or what will be necessary to enable you 
to do his bidding. But you need not possess the book, 



INAUGURAL. 149 

nor read it through. I will translate the pieces to the 
authority of which I shall appeal ; and, in process of 
time, b}^ analysis of this fragmentary treatise, show 
you some characters not usually understood of the 
simplicity as well as subtlety common to most great 
workmen of that age. Afterward we will collect 
the instructions of other undisputed masters, till we 
have obtained a code of laws clearly resting on the 
consent of antiquity. 

While, however, I thus in some measure limit 
for the present the methods of your practice, I 
shall endeavor to make the courses of my university 
lectures as wide in their range as my knowledge 
will permit. The range so conceded will be narrow 
enough ; but I believe that my proper function is 
not to acquaint you with the general history, but 
with the essential principles of art ; and with its 
history only when it has been both great and good 
or where some special excellence of it requires 
examination of the causes to which it must be as- 
cribed. 

27. But if either our work, or our inquiries, are to 
be indeed successful in their own field, they must be 
connected with others of a sterner character. IS'ow 
listen to me, if I have in these past details lost or bur- 
dened your attention ; for this is what I have chiefly 
to say to you. The art of any country is the exponent 
of its social and political virtues. I will show you 



150 LECTURES ON ART. 

that it is so in some detail, in the second of my 
subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this 
as one of the things, and the most important of all 
things, I can positively declare to you. The art, or 
general productive and formative energy, of any coun- 
try, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can 
have noble art only from noble persons, associated 
under laws fitted to their time and circumstances. 
And the best skill that any teacher of art could spend 
here in your help, would not end in enabling you even 
so much as rightly to draw" the water-lilies in the Cher- 
well (and though it did, the work w^hen done w^ould 
not be worth the lilies themselves) unless both he and 
you were seeking, as I trust we shall together seek, in 
the laws w^iich regulate the finest industries, the clue 
to the laws which regulate all industries, and in better 
obedience to which we shall actually have hencefor- 
ward to live, not merely in compliance Avith our own 
sense of what is right, but under the weight of quite 
literal necessity. For the trades by w^hich the British 
people has believed it to be the highest of destinies to 
maintain itself, cannot now long remain undisputed in 
its hands; its unemployed poor are daily becoming- 
more violently criminal ; and a searching distress in 
the middle classes, arising partly from their vanity in 
living always up to their incomes, and partly from 
their folly in imagining that they can subsist in idle- 
ness upon usury, will at last compel the sons and 



INAUGURAL, ' 151 

daughters of English families to acquaint themselves 
with the principles of providential economy ; and to 
learn that food can only be got out of the ground, 
and competence only secured by frugality ; and that 
although it is not possible for all to be occupied in the 
highest arts, nor for any, guiltlessly, to pass their days 
in a succession of pleasures, the most perfect mental 
culture possible to men is founded on their useful ener- 
gies, and their best arts and brightest happiness are 
consistent, and consistent only, with their virtue. 

28. This I repeat, gentlemen, will soon become 
manifest to those among us, and there are yet many, 
who are honest hearted. And the future fate of Eng- 
land depends upon the position they then take, and on 
their courage in maintaining it. 

There is a destiny now possible to us— the highest 
ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We 
are still undegenerate in race ; a race mingled of the 
best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in tem- 
per, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace 
to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure 
mercy, which we must either now finally betray, or 
learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an 
inheritance of honor, bequeathed to us through a 
thousand years of noble history, which it should be 
our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice, so 
that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honor, should 
be the most offending souls alive. Within the last 



152 LECTURES ON ART. 

few years we have had the laws of natural science 
opened to us with a rapidity which has been blinding 
by its brightness ; and means of transit and communi- 
cation given to us, which have made but one kingdom 
of the habitable globe. One kingdom — but who is to 
be its king? Is there to be no king in it, think you, 
and every man to do that which is right in his own 
eyes ? Or only kings of terror, and the obscene em- 
pires of Mammon and Belial ? Or will you, youths of 
England, make your country again a royal throne of 
kings ; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of 
light, a center of peace ; mistress of Learning and of 
the Arts ; faithful guardian of great memories in the 
midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions — faithful 
servant of time-tried principles, under temptation 
from fond experiments and licentious desires ; and 
amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations 
worshiped in her strange valor, of good-will toward 
men? 

29. Yexilla regis prodeunt. Yes, but of which 
king ? There are the two oriflammes ; which shall we 
plant on the farthest islands — the one that floats in 
heavenly fire, or that hangs heavy with foul tissue of 
terrestrial gold ? There is indeed a course of benefi- 
cent glory open to us, such as never v»^as yet offered to 
any poor group of mortal souls. But it must be — it is 
with us, now, " Keign or die." And if it shall be said 
of this country, Feoe per viltate, il gran rifiiUo ; that 



INAUGURAL. I53 

refusal of the crown will be, of all yet recorded in his- 
tor}^, the shamefuUest and most untimely. 

And this is what she must either do, or perish : she 
must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, 
formed of her most energetic and worthiest men ; seiz- 
ing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set 
her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists 
that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country 
and that their first aim is to be to advance the power 
of England by land and sea ; and that, though they 
live on a distant plot of ground, they are no more to 
consider themselves therefore disfranchised from their 
native land than the sailors of her fleets do, because 
they float on distant waves. So that literally, these 
colonies must be fastened fleets, and every man of 
them must be under authority of captains and ofiicers, 
whose better command is to be over fields and streets 
instead of ships of the line ; and England, in these her 
motionless navies (or, in the true and mightiest sense, 
motionless churches, ruled by pilots on the Galilean 
lalie of all the world) is to " expect every man to do his 
duty ; " recognizing that duty is indeed possible no less 
in peace than war ; and that if we can get men, for 
little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths 
for love of England, we may find men also who will 
plow and sow for her, who will behave kindly and 
righteously for her, who will bring up their children 
to love her, and who will gladden themselves in the 



154 LEVTURES ON ART. 

brightness of her glory, more than in all the light of 
tropic skies. 

But that they may be able to do this, she must make 
her own majesty stainless ; she must give them 
thoughts of their home of which they can be proud. 
The England who is to be mistress of half the earth 
cannot remain herself a heap of cinders, trampled by 
contending and miserable crowds; she must yet again 
become the England she was once, and in all beautiful 
ways more ; so happy, so secluded, and so pure, that 
in her sky — polluted by no unholy clouds — she may bo 
able to spell rightly of every star that heaven dotli 
show ; and in her fields, ordered and wide and fair, of 
every herb that sips the dew ; and under the green 
avenues of her enchanted garden, a sacred Circe, true 
daughter of the Sun, she must guide the human arts, 
and gather the divine knowledge, of distant nations, 
transformed from savageness to manhood, and re- 
deemed from despairing into Peace. 

30. You think that an impossible ideal. Be it so ; 
refuse to accept it if you will ; but see that you form 
3^our own in its stead. All that I ask of you is to 
have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country 
and yourselves; no matter how restricted, so that it be 
fixed and unselfish. I know what stout hearts are in 
you, to answer acknowledged need ; but it is the fatal- 
lest form of error in English youth to hide their best 
hardihood till it fades for lack of sunshine, and to act 



INAUGUJRAL, 155 

ill disdain of purpose, till all purpose is vain. It is 
not by deliberate, but by careless selfishness; not by 
compromise with evil, but by dull following of good, 
that the weight of national evil increases upon us daily. 
Break through at least this pretence of existence ; de- 
termine what you will be, and what you would win. 
You will not decide wrongly if you resolve to decide 
at all. Were even the choice between lawless pleasure 
and loyal suffering, you would not, I believe, choose 
basely. But your trial is not so sharp. It is between 
drifting in confused wreck among the castaways of 
Fortune, who condemns to assured ruin those who 
know not either how to resist her^ or obey ; between 
this, I say, and the taking your appointed part in the 
heroism of Rest ; the resolving to share in the victory 
which is to the weak rather than the strong; and the 
binding yourselves by that law, which, thought on 
through lingering night and laboring day, makes a 
man's life to be as a tree planted by the water-side, 
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season — 



"et folium ejus non defluet, 
ET omnia, qu^cunque faciet, pkosperabuntur." 



156 LECTURES ON ART, 



LECTUEE II. 

THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 

31. It was stated, and I trust partly with your ac- 
ceptance, in my opening lecture, that the study on 
which we are about to enter cannot be rightly under- 
taken except in furtherance of the grave purposes of 
life with respect to which the rest of the scheme of 
your education here is designed. But you can scarcely 
have at once felt all that I intended in saying so — 
3^ou cannot but be still partly under the impression 
that the so-called fine arts are merely modes of grace- 
ful recreation, and a new resource for your times of 
rest. Let me ask you, forthwith, so far as you can 
trust me, to change your thoughts in this matter. All 
the great arts have for their object either the support 
or exaltation of human life — usually both ; and their 
dignity, and ultimately their very existence, depend on 
their being fjiEtd XdBoyov dXrjvi,^ that is to say, appre- 
hending, with right reason, the nature of the materials 
they work with, of the things they relate or represent, 
and of the faculties to which they are addressed. And 
farther, they form one united system from which it is 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 15? 

impossible to remove any part without harm to the 
rest. They are founded first in mastery, by strength 
of arm, of the earth and sea, in agriculture and sea- 
manship ; then their inventive power begins, with the 
clay in the hand of the potter, whose art is the 
humblest, but truest type of the forming of the human 
body and spirit ; and in the carpenter's work, which 
probably was the early employment of the Founder of 
our religion. And until men have perfectly learned 
the laws of art in clay and wood, they can consum- 
mately know no others. ]^or is it without the strange 
significance which you will find in what at first seemed 
chance, in all noble histories, as soon as you can read 
them rightly — that the statue of Athena Polias was of 
olive wood, and that the Greek temple and Gothic 
spire are both merely the permanent representations 
of useful wooden structures. On these two first arts 
follow building in stone, sculpture, metal work, and 
painting; every art being properly called "fine" 
which demands the exercise of the full faculties of 
heart and intellect. For though the fine arts are not 
necessarily imitative or representative, for their essence 
is being ^Ttspi ysvEdir^ — occupied in the actual production 
of beautiful form or color — still, the highest of them 
are appointed also to relate to us the utmost ascer- 
tainable truth respecting visible things and moral 
feelings; and this pursuit of fact is the vital element of 
the art power — that in which alone it can develop 



158 LECTURES ON ART, 

itself to its utmost. And I will anticipate by an asser- 
tion which you will at present think too bold, but 
which I am willing that you should think so, in order 
that you may well remember it — the highest thing 
that art can do is to set before you the true image of 
the presence of a noble human being. It has never 
done more than this, and it ought not to do less. 

32. The great arts — forming thus one perfect 
scheme of human skill, of which it is not right to 
call one division more honorable, though it may be 
more subtle, than another — have had, and can have, 
but three principal directions of purpose — first that 
of enforcing the religion of men : secondly, that of 
perfecting their ethical stated ; thirdly, that of doing 
them material service. 

33. I do not doubt but that you are surprised at 
my saying the arts can in their second function 
only be directed to the perfecting of ethical state, 
it being our usual impression that they are often 
destructive of morality. But it is impossible to di- 
rect fine art to an immoral end, except by giving it 
characters unconnected with its fineness, or by ad- 
dressing it to persons who cannot perceive it to be 
fine. Whosoever recognizes it is exalted by it. On 
the other hand, it has been commonly thought that 
art was a most fitting means for the enforcement 
of religious doctrines and emotions ; whereas there 
is, as I must presently try to show j^ou room for 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 150 

grave doubt whether it has not in this function 
hitherto done evil rather than good. 

3^. In this and the two next following lectures, I 
shall endeavor therefore to show you the grave re- 
lations of human art, in these three functions, to 
human life. I can do this but roughly, as you may 
well suppose — since each of these subjects would re- 
quire for its right treatment years instead of hours. 
Only, remember, I have already given years, not a 
few, to each of them ; and what I try to tell you 
now will be only so much as is absolutely necessary 
to set our work on a clear foundation. You may 
not, at present, see the necessity for aiiy foundation, 
and may think that I ought to put pencil and paper 
in your hands at once. On that point I must sim- 
ply answer, " Trust me a little while," asking you 
liowever also to remember, that — irrespectively of 
what you do last or first — my true function here is 
not that of your master in painting, or sculpture, or 
pottery ; but my real duty is to show you what it is 
that makes any of these arts fine, or the contrary 
of fine ; essentially good, or essentially base. You 
need not fear my not being pratical enough for you ; 
all the industry you choose to give me I will take ; 
but far the better part of what you may gain by 
such industry would be lost, if I did not first lead 
you to see what every form of art-industry intends, and 
why some of it is justly called right, and some wrong. 



100 LECTURES ON ART, 

35. It would be well if you were to look over, with 
respect to this matter, the end of the second, and what 
interests you of the third book of Plato's Eepublic; 
noting therein these two principal things, of which I 
have to speak in this and my next lecture : first, the 
power which Plato so frankly, and quite justly, attri- 
butes to art, of falsifying our conceptions of Deity : 
which power he by fatal error partly implies may be 
used wisely for good, and that the feigning is only 
wrong when it is of evil, 'kdv n? mv ^c(X<^^ tpsvdrjrai;'' and 
you may trace through all that follows the beginning 
of the change of Greek ideal art into a beautiful ex- 
pediency, instead of what it was in the days of Pindar, 
the statement of what " could not be otherwise than 
so." But, in the second place, you will find in those 
books of the Polity, stated with far greater accuracy 
of expression than our English language admits, the 
essential relations of art to morality ; the sum of these 
being given in one lovely sentence, which, considering 
that we have to-day grace done us by fair companion- 
ship, you will pardon me for translating. " Must it be 
then only with our poets that we insist they shall 
either create for us the image of a noble morality, or 
among us create none ? or shall we not also keep guard 
over all other workers for the people, and forbid them 
to make what is ill customed, and unrestrained, and 
and ungentle, and without order or shape, either in 
likenesses of living things, or in buildings, or in any 



1 



J 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 161 

other thing whatsoever that is made for the people ? 
and shall we not rather seek for workers w^ho can 
track the inner nature of all that may be sweetly 
schemed ; so that the young men, as living in a whole- 
some place, may be profited by everything that, in 
work fairly wrought, may touch them through hear- 
ing or sight — as if it were a breeze bringing health to 
them from places strong for life 1 " 

36. And now — but one word, before we enter on 
our task, as to the way you must understand what I 
may endeavor to tell you. 

Let me beg you — now and always — not to think that 
I mean more than I say. In all probability, T mean 
just what I say, and only that. At all events I do 
fully mean that, and if there is anything reserved in 
my mind, it will be probably different from what you 
would guess. You are perfectly welcome to know all 
that I think, as soon as I have put before you all my 
grounds for thinking it ; but by the time I have 
done so, you will be able to form an opinion of your 
own ; and mine will then be of no consequence to 
you. 

37. I use then to-day, as I shall in future use the 
word " religion," as signifying the feelings of love, rev- 
erence, or dread with which the human mind is af- 
fected by its conceptions of spiritual being ; and you 
know w^ell how necessary it is, both to the rightness of 
our own life, and to the understanding the lives of 



162 LECTURES ON ART, 

others, that we should always keep clearly distin- 
guished our ideas of religion, as thus defined, and of 
morality, as the law of rightness in human conduct. 
For there are many religions, but there is only one 
morality. There are moral and immoral religions, 
which differ as much in precept as in emotion ; but 
there is only one morality, which has been, is, and 
must be forever, an instinct in the hearts of all civil 
ized men, as certain and unalterable as their outward 
bodily form, and which receives from religion neither 
law, nor peace ; but only hope, and felicity. 

38. The pure forms or states of religion hitherto 
known, are those in which a healthy humanity, find- 
ing in itself many foibles and sins, has imagined, or 
been made conscious of, the existence of higher spirit- 
ual personality, liable to no such fault or stain ; and 
has been assisted in effort, and consoled in pain, by 
reference to the will or sympathy of such more pure 
spirits, whether imagined or real. I am compelled to 
use these painful latitudes of expression, because no 
analysis has hitherto sufficed to distinguish accurately, 
in historical narrative, the difference between impres- 
sions resulting from the imagination of the worshiper, 
and those made, if any, b}^ the actually local and 
temporary presence of another spirit. For instance, 
take the vision, which of all others has been since 
made most frequently the subject of physical represen- 
tation — the appearance to Ezekiel and St. John of the 



HELATION OF ART TO RELIGION, 163 

four living creatures, which throughout Christendom 
have been used to symbolize the Evangelists.* Sup- 
posing such interpretation just, one of those figures 
was either the mere symbol to St. John of himself, or 
it was the power which inspired him manifesting itself 
in an independent form. Which of these it was, or 
whether neither of these, but a vision of other powers, 
or a dream, of which neither the prophet himself 
knew, nor can any other person yet know, the inter- 
pretation, I suppose no modestly-tempered and accu- 
rate thinker would now take upon himself to decide. 
ISTor is it therefore anywise necessary for you to decide 
on that, or any other such question ; but it is necessary 
that you should be bold enough to look every oppos- 
ing question steadily in its face ; and modest enough, 
having done so, to know when it is too hard for you. 
But above all things, see that you be modest in your 
thoughts, for of this one thing we may be absolutely 
sure, that all our thoughts are but degrees of dark- 
ness. And in these days you have to guard against 
the fatallest darkness of the two opposite Prides : the 
Pride of Faith, which imagines that the Nature of the 
Deity can be defined by its convictions ; and the Pride 
of Science, which imagines that the Energy of Deity 
can be explained by its analysis. 

39. Of these, the first, the Pride of Faith, is now, 
as it has been always, the most deadly, because the 

* Only the Gospels " iV. Evangelia," according to St. Jerome. 



164 LEGTUUES ON ART 

most complacent and subtle ; because it invests ever}) 
evil passion of our nature with the aspect of an angel 
of light, and enables the self-love, which might other- 
wise have been put to wholesome shame, and the cruel 
carelessness of the ruin of our fellow-men, which 
might otherwise have been warmed into human love, 
or at least checked by human intelligence, to congeal 
themselves into the mortal intellectual disease of ima- 
gining that myriads of the inhabitants of the world 
for four thousand years have been left to wander and 
perish, many of them everlastingly, in order that, in 
fullness of time, divine truth might be preached suffi- 
ciently to ourselves ; with this farther ineffable mischief 
for direct result, that multitudes of kindly-disposed, 
gentle, and submissive persons, who might else by their 
true patience have alloyed the hardness of the com- 
mon crowd, and by their activity for good, balanced 
its misdoing, are withdrawn from all such true service 
of man, that they may pass the best part of their 
lives in what they are told is the service of God ; 
namely, desiring what they cannot obtain, lamenting 
what they could avoid, and reflecting on what they 
cannot understand. 

40. This, I repeat, is the deadliest, but for you, 
under existing circumstances, it is becoming daily, 
almost hourly, the least probable form of pride. That 
which you have chiefly to guard against consists in the 
over- valuing of minute though correct discovery ; the 



RELATlOIi OF ART TO RELIGION, 165 

groundless denial of all that seems to you to have been 
groundlessly affirmed ; and the interesting yourselves 
too curiously in the progress of some scientific minds, 
which in their judgment of the universe can be com- 
pared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms 
in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we 
may conceive them as tasting w^ith discrimination of 
the wood, and with repugnance of the color, and declar- 
ing that even this unlooked-for and undesirable 
combination is a normal result of the action of mole- 
cular forces. 

41. 1^0 w, I must very earnestly warn you, in the 
beginning of my work with you here, against allow- 
ing either of these forms of egotism to interfere with 
your judgment or practice of art. On the one hand, 
you must not allow the expression of your own favor- 
ite religious feelings by any particular form of art to 
modify your judgment of its absolute merit ; nor al- 
low the art itself to become an illegitimate means of 
deepening and confirming your convictions, by realiz- 
ing to your eyes what you dimly conceive with the 
brain ; as if the greater clearness of the image were a 
stronger proof of its truth. On the other hand, you 
must not allow your scientific habit of trusting nothing 
but what you have ascertained, to prevent you from 
appreciating, or at least endeavoring to qualify your- 
selves to appreciate, the work of the highest faculty 
of the humjin mind— its imagination — when it is toil- 



106 LECTURES ON AllT. 

ing in the presence of things that cannot be dealt with 
by any other power. 

42. These are both vital conditions of your healthy 
progress. On the one hand, observe that you do not 
willfully use the realistic power of art to convince 
yourselves of historical or theological statements 
which you cannot otherwise prove; and which you 
wish to prove. On the other hand, that you do not 
check your imagination and conscience W' hile seizing 
the truths of which they alone are cognizant, because 
you value too highly the scientific interest which at- 
taches to the investigation of second causes. 

For instance, it may be quite possible to show" the 
conditions in water and electricity which necessarily 
produce the craggy outline, the apparently self-con- 
tained silvery light, and the sulphurous blue shadow of 
a thunder cloud, and which separate these from the 
depth of the golden peace in the dawn of a summer 
morning. Similarly, it may be possible to show the 
necessities of structure which groove the fangs and 
depress the brow of the asp, and ^vhich distinguish 
the character of its head from that of the face of a 
young girl. But it is the function of the rightly- 
trained imagination to recognize, in these, and such 
other relative aspects, the unity of teaching which 
impresses, alike on our senses and our conscience, the 
eternal difference between good and evil: and the 
rule, over the clouds of heaven and over the creatures 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION IG7 

in the earth, of the same Spirit which teaches to our 
own hearts the bitterness of death, and strength of 
love. 

43. Now, therefore, approaching our subject in 
this balanced temper, which will neither resolve to see 
only what it would desire, nor expect to see only 
what it can explain, we shall find our inquiry into the 
relation of art to religion is distinctly threefold; 
first, we have to ask how far art may have been liter- 
ally directed by spiritual powers ; secondly, how far, 
if not inspired, it -may have been exalted by them ; 
lastly, how far, in any of its agencies, it has advanced 
the cause of the creeds it has been used to recommend. 

44. First : What ground have we for thinking 
that art has ever been inspired as a message or revela- 
tion? What internal evidence is there in the work of 
great artists of their having been under the authorita- 
tive guidance of supernatural powers? 

It is true that the answer to so mysterious a question 
cannot rest alone upon internal evidence; but it is 
well that you should know what might, from that evi- 
dence alone, be concluded. And the more impartially 
you examine the phenomena of imagination, the more 
firmly you will be led to conclude that they are the 
result of the influence of the common and vital, but 
not, therefore, less divine spirit, of which some por- 
tion is given to all living creatures in such manner as 
may be adapted to their rank in creation • and that 



168 LECTURES ON ART, 

everything which men rightly accomplish is indeed 
done by divine help, but under a consistent law which 
is never departed from. 

The strength of this spiritual life within us may be 
increased or lessoned by our own conduct ; it varies 
from time to time, as physical strength varies ; it is 
summoned on different occasions by our will, and 
dejected by our distress, or our sin ; but it is always 
equally human, and equally divine. We are men, and 
not mere animals, because a special form of it is with 
us always ; we are nobler and baser men, as it is with 
us more or less ; but it is never given to us in any 
degree which can make us more than men. 

45. Observe : I give you this general statement 
doubtfully, and only as that toward which an impar- 
tial reasoner will, I think, be inclined by existing data. 
But I shall be able to show you, without any doubt, in 
the course of our studies, that the achievements of art 
which have been usually looked upon as the results of 
peculiar inspiration, have been arrived at only through 
long courses of wisely directed labor, and under the 
influence of feelings which are common to all hu- 
manity. 

But of these feelings and powers which in different 
degrees are common to humanity, you are to note that 
there are three principal divisions : first, the instincts 
of construction or melody, which we share with 
lower animals, and which are in us as native as the in- 



II 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 169 

stinct of the bee or nightingale ; secondly, the faculty 
of vision, or of dreaming, whether in sleep or in con- 
scious trance, or by voluntary exerted fancy ; and 
lastly, the power of rational inference and collection, 
of both the laws and forms of beauty. 

46. Now the faculty of vision, being closely asso- 
ciated with the innermost spiritual nature, is the one i 
which has by most reasoners been held for the peculiar 
channel of divine teaching ; and it is a fact that great 
part of purely didactic art has been the record, 
whether in language, or by linear representation, of 
actual vision involuntarily received at the moment, 
though cast on a mental retina blanched by the past 
course of faithful life. But it is also true that these 
visions, where most distinctly received, are always — I 
speak deliberately — always, the sign of some mental 
limitation or derangement ; and that the persons who 
most clearly recognize their value, exaggeratedly esti- 
mate it, choosing what they find to be useful, and call- 
ing that " inspired," and disregarding what they per- 
ceive to be useless, though presented to the visionary 
by an equal authority. 

47. Thus it is probable that no Avork of art has 
been more widely didactic that Albert Dlirer's engrav- 
ing, known as the '^ Knight and Death."* But that is 
only one of a series of works representing similarly 
vivid dreams, of which some are uninteresting, except 

* Standard Series, No. 9. 



170 LECTURES ON ART, 

for the manner of their representation, as the " St. 
Hubert," and others are unintelligible ; some fright- 
ful, and wholly unprofitable ; so that we find the vis- 
ionary faculty in that great painter, when accurately 
examined, to be a morbid influence, abasing his skill 
more frequently than encouraging it, and sacrificing 
the greater part of his energies upon vain subjects, two 
only being produced, in the course of a long life, which 
are of high didactic value, and both of these capable 
only of giving sad courage.* Whatever the value of 
these two, it bears more the aspect of a treasure ob- 
tained at great cost of suffering, than of a directly 
granted gift from heaven. 

48. On the contrary, not only the highest, but the 
most consistent results have been attained in art by 
men whom the faculty of vision, however strong, was 
subordinate to that of deliberative design, and tranquil- 
ized by a measured, continual, not feverish, but affec- 
tionate, observance of the quite unvisionary facts of 
the surrounding world. 

And so far as we can trace the connection of their 
powers with the moral character of their lives, we shall 
find that the best art is the work of good, but of not 
distinctively religious men, who, at least, are conscious 
of no inspiration, and often so unconscious of their 

* The meaning of the "Knight and Death," even in this respect, 
lias lately been questioned on good grounds. See note on the plate 
in Catalogue. 



II 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. Vil 

superiority to others, that one of the very greatest of 
them, deceived by his modesty, has asserted that "all 
things are possible to well-directed labor." 

49. The second question, namely, how far art, if 
not inspired, has yet been ennobled by religion, I shall 
not touch upon to-day ; for it both requires technical 
criticism, and would divert you too long from, the main 
question of all — How far religion has been helped 1 y 
art? 

You will find that the operation of formative art 
(I will not speak to-day of music) the operation of 
formative art on religious creed is essentially twofold ; 
the realization, to the eyes, of imagined spiritual persons; 
and the limitation of their imagined presence to cer- 
tain places. We will examine these two functions of 
it successively. 

50. At first, consider accurately what the agency 
of art is, in realizing, to the sight, our conceptions of 
spiritual persons. 

For instance. Assume that we believe that the Ma- 
donna is always present to hear and answer our prayers. 
Assume also that this is true. 1 think that per- 
sons in a perfectly honest, faithful, and humble temper 
would in that case desire only to feel so much of the 
divine presence as the spiritual power herself chose to 
make felt ; and, above all things, not to think they 
saw, or knew, anything except what might be truly 
perceived or known. 



172 LECTURES ON ART. 

But a mind imperfectly faithful, and impatient m its 
distress, or craving in its dullness for a more distinct 
and convincing sense of the Divinity, would endeavor 
to complete, or perhaps we should rather say to con- 
tract its conception, into the definite figure of a woman 
wearing a blue or crimson dress, and having fair fea- 
tures, dark eyes, and gracefully arranged hair. 

Suppose, after forming such a conception, that we 
have the power to realize and preserve it, this image 
of a beautiful figure with a pleasant expression cannot 
but have the tendency of afterward leading us to think 
of the Virgin as present, when she is not actually pres- 
ent, or as pleased with us, when she is not actually 
pleased; or if we resolutely prevent ourselves from 
such imagination, nevertheless the existence of the 
imaffe beside us will often turn our thouo^hts toward 
subjects of religion, when otherwise they would have 
been differently occupied ; and, in the midst of other 
occupations, will familiarize more or less, and even 
mechanically associate with common or faultful states 
of mind, the appearance of the supposed divine 
person. 

51. There are thus two distinct operations upon 
our mind : first, the art makes us believe what we 
would not otherwise have believed ; and secondly, it 
makes us think of subjects we should not otherwise 
have thought of, intruding them amid our ordinary 
thoughts in a confused and familiar manner. We can- 



RELATION OP ART TO RELIOTON. 173 

not with any certainty affirm the advantage or the 
harm of such accidental pieties, for their effect will be 
very different on different characters: but without 
any question, the art, which makes us believe what 
we would not have otherwise believed, is misapplied, 
and in most instances very dangerously so. Our duty 
is to believe in the existence of divine, or any other, 
persons, only upon rational proofs of their existence ; 
and not because we have seen pictures of them. And 
since the real relations between us and higher spirits 
are, of all facts concerning our being those which it 
is most important to know accurately, if we know at 
all, it is a folly so great as to amount to real, though 
most unintentional sin, to allow our conceptions of 
those relations to be modified by our own undisci- 
plined fancy. 

52. But now observe, it is here necessary to draw a 
distinction, so subtle that in dealing with facts it is 
continually impossible to mark it with precision, yet 
so vital, that not only your understanding of the power 
of art, but the working of your minds in matters of 
primal moment to you, depends on the effort you 
make to affirm this distinction strongly. The art 
which realizes a creature of the imagination is only 
mischievous when that realization is conceived to im- 
ply, or does practically induce a belief in, the real ex- 
istence of the imagined personage, contrary to, or un- 
justified by the other evidence of its existence. But 



174 LECTURES ON ART. 

if the art only represents the personage on the under- 
standing that its form is imaginary, then the effort at 
realization is healthful and beneficial. 

For instance. I shall place in your standard series 
a Greek design of Apollo crossing the sea to Delphi, 
which is an example of one of the highest types of 
Greek or any other art. So far as that design is only 
an expression, under the symbol of a human form, of 
what may be rightly imagined respecting the solar 
power, the art is right and ennobling ; but so far as 
it conveyed to the Greek the idea of there being a real 
Apollo, it was mischievous, whether there be, or be 
not a real Apollo. If there is no real Apollo, then 
the art was mischievous because it deceived; but if 
there is a real Apollo, then it was still more mischiev- 
ous, for it not only began the degradation of the im- 
age of that true god into a decoration for niches, and 
a device for seals ; but prevented any true witness be- 
ing borne to his existence. For if the Greeks, instead 
of multiplying representations of what they imagined 
to be the figure of the god, had given us accurate 
drawings of the heroes and battles of Marathon and 
Salamis, and had simply told us in plain Greek what 
evidence they had of the power of Apollo, either 
through his oracles, his help or chastisement, or by im- 
mediate vision, they Avould have served their religion 
more truly than by all the vase-paintings and fine 
statues that ever were buried or adored. 



J 



BELATION OF ART TO RELIGION, 175 

53. Now in this particular instance, and in many 
other examples of fine Greek art, the two conditions 
of thought, symbolic and realistic, are mingled; and 
the art is helpful, as I will hereafter show you, in 
one function, and in the other so deadly, that I think 
no degradation of conception of Deity has ever been 
quite so base as that implied by the designs of 
Greek vases in the period of decline, say about 
250 B.C. 

But though among the Greeks it is thus nearly al- 
ways difficult to say what is symbolic and what real- 
istic, in the range of Christian art, the distinction is 
clear. In that, a vast division of imaginative work is 
occupied in the symbolism of virtues, vices, or natural 
powers or passions ; and in the representation of per- 
sonages who, though nominally real, become in con 
ception symbolic. In the greater part of this work 
there is no intention of implying the existence of the 
represented creature ; DUrer's " Melencolia " and Giot- 
to's " Justice " are accurately characteristic examples. 
Now all such art is wholly good and useful when it 
is the work of good men. 

54. Again, there is another division of Christian 
work in which the persons represented, though nom- 
inally real, are treated only as dram.atis-jperso7i(]B of a 
poem, and so presented confessedly as subjects of im- 
agination. All this poetic art is also good when it is 
the work of good men. 



176 LEGTVBES ON ART 

55. There remains only therefore to be considered, 
as truly religious, the work which definitely implies 
and modifies the conception of the existence of a real 
person. There is hardly any great art which entirely 
belongs to this class ; but Raphael's " Madonna della 
Seggiola " is as accurate a type of it as I can give you ; 
Holbein's "Madonna at Dresden," the "Madonna di 
San Sisto," and the " Madonna of Titian's Assumption," 
all belong mainly to this class, but are removed some- 
what from it (as I repeat, nearly all great art is) into 
the poetical one. It is only the bloody crucifixes and 
gilded virgins and other such lower forms of imagery 
(by which, to the honor of the English Church, it has 
been truly claimed for her, that " she has never ap- 
pealed to the madness or dullness of her people ") 
which belong to the realistic class in strict limitation, 
and which properly constitute the type of it. 

There is indeed an important school of sculpture in 
Spain, directed to the same objects, but not demand- 
ing at present any special attention. And finally, 
there is the vigorous and most interesting realistic 
school of our own, in modern times, mainly known to 
the public by Holman Hunt's picture the "Light of the 
"World," though, I believe, deriving its first origin from 
the genius of the painter to whom you owe also the 
revival of interest, first here in Oxford, and then uni- 
versally, in the cycle of early English legend — Dante 
Eossetti. 



R EL A TION OF A R T TO REL IGION. 177 

56. The effect of this realistic art on the rehgious 
mind of Europe varies in scope more than any other 
art power ; for in its higher branches it touches the 
most sincere religious minds, affecting an earnest class 
of persons who cannot be reached by merely poetical 
design ; while in its lowest, it addresses itself not only 
to the most vulgar desires for religious excitement, but 
to the mere thirst for sensation of horror which char- 
acterizes the uneducated orders of partially civilized 
countries ; nor merely to the thirst for horror, but to 
the strange love of death, as such, which has some- 
times in Catholic countries showed itself peculiarly by 
the endeavor to paint the images in the chapels of the 
Sepulchre so as to look deceptively like corpses. The 
same morbid instinct has also affected the minds of 
many among the more imaginative and powerful art- 
ists with a feverish gloom which distorts their finest 
work ; and lastly — and this is the worst of all its ef- 
fects — it has occupied the sensibility of Christian 
women, universally, in lamenting the sufferings of 
Christ, instead of preventing those of His people. 

57. When any of you next go abroad, observe, and 
consider the meaning of the sculptures and paintings, 
which of every rank in art, and in every chapel and 
cathedral, and by every mountain path, recall the 
hours, and represent the agonies, of the Passion of 
Christ : and try to form some estimate of the efforts 
that have been made by the four art of eloquence, 



178 LECTURES ON ART, 

music, painting, and sculpture, since the twelfth cen 
tury, to wring out of the hearts of women the last 
drops of pity that could be excited for this merely 
physical agony : for the art nearly always dwells on 
the physical wounds or exhaustion chiefly, and degrades, 
far more than it animates, the conception of pain. 

Then try to conceive the quantity of time, and of 
excited and thrilling emotion, which have been wasted 
by the tender and delicate women of Christendom 
during these last six hundred years, in thus picturing 
to themselves, under the influence of such imagery, 
the bodily pain, long since passed, of One Person — 
which, so far as they indeed conceived it to be sus- 
tained by a divine nature, could not for that reason 
have been less endurable than the agonies of any sim- 
ple human death by torture : and then try to estimate 
what might have been the better result, for the right- 
eousness and felicity of mankind, if these same women 
had been taught the deep meaning of the last words 
that were ever spoken by their Master to those who 
had ministered to Him of their substance : " Daugh- 
ters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for 
yourselves, and for your children." If they had but 
been taught to measure with their pitiful thoughts the 
tortures of battlefields ; the slowly consuming plagues 
of death in the starving children, and w^asted age, of 
the innumerable desolate those battles left ; nay, in 
our own life of peace, the agony of unnurtured, un- 



RELATION OF ART TO BELIOION. 170 

taught, unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's 
edge to know how they should have lived ; and the 
worse pain of those whose existence, not the ceasing 
of it, is death ; those to whom the cradle was a curse, 
and for whom the words they cannot hear, " ashes to 
ashes," are all that they have ever received of benedic- 
tion. These — you who would fain have wept at His feet, 
or stood by his cross— these you have always with 
you, Him you have not always. 

58. The Avretched in death you have always with 
you. Yes, and the brave and good in life you have 
always ; these also needing help, though you sup- 
posed they had only to help others; these also claim- 
ing to be thought for, and remembered. And you will 
find, if you look into history with this clue, that one 
of quite the chief reasons for the continual misery of 
mankind is that they are always divided in their wor- 
ship between angels or saints, who are out of their 
sight, and need no help, and proud and evil-minded 
men, who are too definitely in their sight, and ought 
not to have their help. And consider how the arts 
have thus followed the worship of the crowd. You 
have paintings of saints and angels, innumerable — of 
petty courtiers, and contemptible or cruel kings, in- 
numerable. Few, how few you have (but these, ob- 
serve, almost always by great painters) of the best 
men, or of their actions. But think for yourselves — 1 
have no time now to enter upon the mighty field, nor 



180 LECTURES ON ART. 

imagination enough to guide me beyond the threshold 
of it — think, what historj^ might have been to us now ; 
nay, what a different history that all of Europe 
might have become, if it had but been the object both 
of the people to discern, and of their arts to honor and 
bear record of the great deeds of their worthiest men. 
And if, instead of living, as they have always hitherto 
done, in a hellish cloud of contention and revenge, 
lighted by fantastic dreams of cloudy sanctities, they 
had sought to reward and punish justly, wherever re- 
ward and punishment were due, but chiefly to reward ; 
and at least rather to bear testimony to the human 
acts w^hich deserved God's anger or His blessing, than 
only in presumptuous imagination to display the secrets 
of Judgment, or the beatitudes of Eternity. 

59. Such I conceive generally, though indeed with 
good arising out of it, for every great evil brings some 
good in its backward eddies — such I conceive to have 
been the deadly function of art in its ministry to 
what, whether in heathen or Christian lands, and 
whether in the pageantry of words, or colors, or fair 
forms, is truly, and in the deep sense, to be called 
idolatry — the serving with the best of our hearts and 
minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made 
for ourselves, while w^e disobey the present call of the 
Master, who is not dead, and Avho is not now fainting 
under His cross, but requiring us to take up ours. 

60. I pass to the second great function of religious 



1 



J 



RELA TION OF ART TO RELIGION. 181 

art, the limitation of the idea of divine presence to 
particular localities. It is of course impossible within 
my present limits to touch upon this power of art. as 
employed on the temples of the gods of various re- 
lictions ; we will examine that on future occasions. To- 
day, I want only to map out main ideas, and I can do 
this best by speaking exclusively of this localizing in- 
fluence as it affects our own faith. 

Observe first, that the localization is almost entirely 
dependent upon human art. You must at least take a 
stone and set it up for a pillar, if you are to mark the 
place, so as to know it again, where a vision appeared. 
A persecuted people, needing to conceal their places 
of worship, may perform every religious ceremony 
first under one crag of the hill-side, and then under 
another, without invalidating the sacredness of the 
rites or sacraments thus administered. It is, there- 
fore, we all acknowledge, inessential that a particular 
spot should be surrounded with a ring of stones, or 
inclosed within Avails of a certain style of architecture, 
and so set apart as the only place where such cere- 
monies may be properly performed ; and it is thus less 
by any direct appeal to experience or to reason, but in 
consequence of the effect upon our senses produced by 
the architecture, that we receive the first strong im- 
pressions of what we afterward contend for as abso- 
lute truth. I particularly wish you to notice how it 
is always by help of human art that such a result is 



183 LECTURES ON ART. 

attained, because, remember always, I am neither dis- 
puting nor asserting the truth of any theological doc- 
trine — that is not ray province — I am only questioning 
the expediency of enforcing that doctrine by the help 
of architecture. Put a rough stone for an altar under 
the hawthorn on a village green — separate a portion 
of the green itself with an ordinary paling from the 
rest — then consecrate, with whatever form j^ou choose, 
the space of grass you have inclosed, and meet within 
the wooden fence as often as you desire to pray or 
preach ; yet you will not easily fasten an impression 
in the minds of the villagers, that God inhabits the 
space of grass inside the fence, and does not extend 
His presence to the common beyond it ; and that the 
daisies and violets on one side of the railing are holy, 
on the other profane. But, instead of a wooden fence, 
build a wall; pave the interior space ; roof it over, so 
as to make it comparatively dark, and you may per 
suade the villagers with ease that you have built a 
house which Deity inhabits, or that you have become, 
in the old French phrase, a "logeur du Bon DieuP 

61. And farther, though I have no desire to intro- 
duce any question as to the truth of what we thus ar- 
chitecturally teach, I would desire you most strictly to 
determine what is intended to be taught. 

Do not think I underrate — I am among the last men 
living who would underrate — the importance of the 
sentiments connected with their church to the popula- 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 183 

tion of a pastoral village. 1 admit, in its fullest ex- 
tent, the moral value of the scene, which is almost 
always one of perfect purity and peace ; and of the 
sense of supernatural love and protection, which fills 
and surrounds the low aisles and homely porch. But 
the question I desire earnestly to leave with you is, 
Avhether all the earth ought not to be peaceful and 
pure, and the acknowledgment of the divine protec- 
tion as universal, as its reality ? That in a mysterious 
way the presence of Deity is vouchsafed where it is 
sought, and withdrawn where it is forgotten, must of 
course be granted as the first postulate in the inquiry : 
but the point for our decision is just this, whether it 
ought always to be sought in one place only, and for- 
gotten in every other. 

It may be replied, that since it is impossible to con 
secrate the entire space of the earth, it is better thus 
to secure a portion of it than none : but surely, if so, 
we ought to make some effort to enlarge the favored 
ground, and even look forward to a time when in 
English villages there may be a God's acre tenanted 
by the living, not the dead ; and when we shall rather 
look with aversion and fear to the remnant of ground 
that is set apart as profane, than with reverence to a 
narrow portion of it enclosed as holy. 

62. But now, farther. Suppose it be admitted 
that by inclosing ground with walls, and performing 
certain ceremonies there habitually, some kind of 



184 LECTURES ON ART, 

sanctity is indeed secured witliin that space — still the 
question remains open whether it be advisable for 
religious purposes to decorate the enclosure. For sep- 
aration the mere walls would be enough. What is the 
purpose of your decoration ? 

Let us take an instance — the most notable with 
which I am acquainted, the Cathedral of Chartres. 
You have there the most splendid colored glass, and 
the richest sculpture, and the grandest proportions of 
building, united to produce a sensation of pleasure and 
awe. We profess that this is to honor the Deity ; or 
in other words, that it is pleasing to Him that we 
should delight our eyes with blue and golden colors, 
and solemnize our spirits by the sight of large stones 
laid one on another, and ingeniously carved. 

63. I do not think that it can be doubted that it is 
pleasing to Him when we do this ; for He has Himself 
prepared for us, nearly every morning and evening, 
windows painted with divine art, in blue and gold and 
vermilion ; windows lighted from within by the luster 
of that heaven which we may assume, at least with 
more certainty than any consecrated ground, to be 
one of His dweUing-places. Again, in every moun- 
tain side, and cliff of rude sea-shore, He has heaped 
stones one upon another of greater magnitude than 
those of Chartres Cathedral, and sculptured them 
with floral ornament — surely not less sacred because 
living 2 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION, 185 

64. Must it not then be only because we love our 
own work better than His, that we respect the lucent 
glass, but not the lucent clouds ; that we weave em- 
broidered robes with ingenious fingers, and make bright 
the gilded vaults Ave have beautifully ordained — while 
yet we have not considered the heavens the work of 
His fingers ; nor the stars of the strange vault which 
He has ordained. And do we dream that by carving 
fonts and lifting pillars in His honor, who cuts the 
way of the rivers among the rocks, and at whose re- 
proof the pillars of the earth are astonished, we shall 
obtain pardon for the dishonor done to the hills and 
streams by which He has appointed our dwelling-place 
— for the infection of their sweet air with poison — for 
the burning up of their tender grass and flowers with 
fire, and for spreading such a shame of mixed luxury 
and misery over our native land, as if we labored only 
that, at least here in England, we might be able to 
give the lie to the song, whether of the Cherubim 
above, or Church beneath — '' Holy, holy. Lord God of 
all creatures ; Heaven— (27i6? Earth — are full of Thy 
glory ? " 

65. And how much more there is that I long to 
say to you ; and how much, I hope, that you would 
like to answer to me, or to question me of! But I 
can say no more to-day. We are not, I trust at the 
end of our talks or thoughts together ; but, if it were 
so, and I never spoke to you more, this that I have 



186 LECTURES ON ART. 

said to you I should have been glad to have been per- 
mitted to say ; and this, farther, which is the sum of 
it — That we may have splendor of art again, and 
with that, we may truly praise and honor our Maker, 
and with that set forth the beauty and holiness of all 
that He has made: but only after we have striven 
with our Avhole hearts first to sanctify the temple 
of the body and spirit of every child that has no roof 
to cover its head from the cold, and no walls to 
guard its soul from corruption, in this our English 
land. 

One word more. 

What I have suggested hitherto, respecting the re- 
lations of Art to Eeligion, you must receive through- 
out as merely motive of thought ; though you must 
have well seen that my own convictions were estab- 
lished finally on some of the points in question. But 
I must in conclusion, tell you something that I Jcnow — 
which if you truly labor, you will one day know 
also ; and which I trust some of you will believe, now. 

During the minutes in which you have been listen- 
ing to me, I suppose that almost at every other sen- 
tence those whose habit of mind has been one of ven- 
eration for established forms and faiths, must have 
been in dread that I was about to say, or in pang of 
regret at my having said, what seemed to them an ir- 
reverent or reckless word touching vitally important 
things, 



RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 187 

So far from this being the fact, it is just because the 
feelings that I most desire to cultivate in your minds 
are those of reverence and admiration, that I am so 
earnest to prevent you from being moved to either by 
trivial or false semblances. This is the thing which I 
KNOW — and which, if you labor faithfully, you shall 
know also — that in reverence is the chief joy and 
power of life — reverence for what is pure and bright 
in your own youth ; for what is true and tried in the 
age of others; for all that is gracious among the 
living, great among the dead, and marvelous in the 
powers that cannot die. 



LEGTUliES ON ART, 



LECTUEE III. 

THE RELATIOIT OF ART TO MORALS. 

^Q. You probably recollect that, in the beginning 
of my last lecture, it was stated that fine art had, and 
could have, but three functions : the enforcing of the 
religious sentiments of men, the perfecting their ethical 
state, and the doing them material service. We have 
to day to examine the mode of its action in the second 
power, that of perfecting the morality or ethical state 
of men. 

Perfecting, observe — not producing. 

You must have the right moral state first, or you 
cannot have the art. But when the art is once ob- 
tained, its reflected action, enhances and completes the 
moral state out of which it arose, and, above all, com- 
municates the exaltation to other minds which are 
already morally capable of the like. 

67. For instance, take the art of singing, and the 
simplest perfect master of it (up to the limits of his 
nature) whom can you find — a skylark. From him 
you may learn what it is to " sing for joy." You must 
get the moral state first, the pure gladness, then 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 189 

give it finished expression ; and it is perfected in itself, 
and made communicable to other creatures capable of 
such joy. But it is incommunicable to those who are 
not prepared to receive it. 

Now, all right human song is, similarly, the finished 
expression, by art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, 
for right causes. And accurately in proportion to the 
rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is 
the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of 
her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. 
And with absolute precision from highest to lowest, 
the fineness of the possible art is an index of the moral 
purity and majesty of the emotion it expresses. You 
may test it practically at any instant. Question with 
yourselves respecting any feeling that has taken 
strong possession of your mind, " Could this be sung 
by a master, and sung nobly, with a true melody and 
art ? " Then it is a right feeling. Could it not be 
sung at all, or only sung ludicrously ? It is abase one. 
And that is so in all the arts ; so that with mathemat- 
ical precision, subject to no error or exception, the art 
of a nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its 
ethical state. 

68. An exponent, observe, and exalting influence ; 
but not the root or cause. You cannot paint or sing 
yourselves into being good men ; you must be good 
men before you can either paint or sing, and then the 
color and sound will complete in you all that is best. 



190 LECTURES ON ART, 

And this it was that I called upon you to hear, sa}^- 
ing, " listen to me at least now," in the first lecture, 
namely, that no art-teaching could be of use to you, 
but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on 
something deeper than all art. For indeed not only 
with this, of which it is my function to show you the 
laws, but much more with the art of all men, which 
you came here chiefly to learn, that of language, the 
chief vices of education have arisen from the one great 
fallacy of supposing that noble language is a communi- 
cable trick of grammar and accent, instead of simply 
the careful expression of right thought. All the vir- 
tues of language are, in their roots, moral ; it becomes 
accurate if the speaker desires to be true ; clear, if he 
speaks with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible ; 
powerful, if he has earnestness ; pleasant if he has 
sense of rythm and order. There are no other virtues 
of language producible by art than these : but let me 
mark more deeply for an instant the significance of 
one of them. Language, I said, is only clear when it 
is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a man's 
word only by understanding his temper. Your own 
word is also as of an unknown tongue to him unless 
he understands yours. And it is this which makes the 
art of language, if any one is to be chosen separately 
from the rest, that which is fittest for the instrument 
of a gentleman's education. To teach the meaning of 
a word thoroughly is to teach the nature of the spirit 



fi 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 101 

that coined it ; the secret of language is the secret oi 
sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the 
gentle. And thus the principles of beautiful speech 
have all been fixed by sincere and kindly speech. On 
the laws which have been determined by sincerity, 
false speech, apparently beautiful, may afterward be 
constructed ; but all such utterance, whether in ora- 
tion or poetry, is not only without permanent power, 
but it is destructive of the principles it has usurped. 
So long as no words are uttered but in faithfulness, so 
long the art of language goes on exalting itself ; but 
the moment it is shaped and chiseled on external prin- 
ciples, it falls into frivolity, and perishes. And this 
truth would have been long ago manifest, had it not 
been that in periods of advanced academical science 
there is always a tendency to deny the sincerity of 
the first masters of language. Once learn to write 
gracefully in the manner of an ancient author, and 
w^e are apt to think that he also wrote in the manner 
of some one else. But no noble nor right style was 
ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart. 

]^o man is worth reading to form your style, who 
does not mean what he says ; nor was any great style 
ever invented but by some man who meant what he 
said. Find out the beginner of a great manner of 
writing, and you have also found the declarer of some 
true facts or sincere passions ; and your whole method 
of reading will thus be quickened, for, being sure 



i92 LECTURES ON ART, 

that your author really meant what he said, you will 
be much more careful to ascertain what it is that he 
means. 

69. And of yet greater importance is it deeply to 
know that every beauty possessed by the language of 
a nation is significant of the innermost laws of its 
being. Keep the temper of the people stern and manly ; 
make their associations grave, courteous, and for 
worthy objects ; occupy them in just deeds ; and 
their tongue must needs be a grand one. ]S"or is it 
possible, therefore — observe the necessary reflected 
action — that any tongue should be a noble one, of 
which the words are not so many trumpet-calls to 
action. All great languages invariably utj:er great 
things, and command them ; they cannot be mimicked 
but by obedience ; the breath of them is inspiration 
because it is not only vocal, but vital ; and you can 
only learn to speak as these men spoke, by becoming 
what these men were. 

70. Now for direct confirmation of this, I want 
you to think over the relation of expression to charac- 
ter in two great masters of the absolute art of lan- 
guage, Yirgil and Pope. You are perhaps surprised 
at the last name ; and indeed you have in English 
much higher grasp and melody of language from 
more passionate minds, but you have nothing else, in 
its range, so perfect. I name, therefore, these two 
men, because they are the two most accomplished 



I 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 193 

Artists, merely as such, whom I know in literature ; and 
because I think you will be afterward interested in 
investigating how the infinite grace in the words of 
the one, the severity in those of the other, and the 
precision in those of both, arise wholly out of the 
moral elements of their minds — out of the deep ten- 
derness in Yirgil which enabled him to write the 
stories of JSTisus and Lausus ; and the serene and just 
benevolence which placed Pope, in his theology, two 
centuries in advance of his time, and enabled him to 
sum the law of noble life in two lines which, so far 
as 1 know, are the most complete, the most concise, 
and the most lofty expression of moral temper exist- 
ing in English words : 

** Never elated, while one man's oppressed; 
Never dejected, while another's bless'd.' 

I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and 
and to make yourselves entirely masters of his system 
of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare aside as 
rather the world's than ours, I hold Pope to be the 
most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of 
the true English mind ; and I think the Dunciad is 
the most absolutely chiseled and monumental work 
"exacted "in our country. You will find, as you 
study Pope, that he has expressed for you, in the 
strictest language and within the briefest limits every 
law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and, 



194 LECTURES ON ART, 

finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, and r& 
signed, contented with its allotted share of life, and 
trusting the problem of its salvation to Him in whose 
hand lies that of the universe. 

71. And now I pass to the arts with which I have 
special concern, in which, though the facts are exactly 
the same, I shall have more difficulty in proving my 
assertion, because very few of us are as cognizant of 
the merit of painting as we are of that of language ; 
and I can only show you whence that merit springs 
from, after having thoroughly shown you in what it 
consists. But, in the meantime, I have simply to tell 
you, that the manual arts are as accurate exponents of 
ethical state, as other modes of expression ; first, with 
absolute precision, of that of the workman, and then 
with precision disguised by many distorting influences, 
of that of the nation to which he belongs. 

And, first, they are a perfect exponent of the mind 
of the workman ; but, being so, remember, if the mind 
be great or complex, the art is not an easy book to 
read ; for we must ourselves possess all the mental 
characters of which we are to read the signs. No man 
can read the evidence of labor who is not himself la- 
borious, for he does not know what the work cost ; 
nor can he read the evidence of true passion if he is 
not passionate; nor of gentleness if he is not gentle* 
and the most subtle signs of fault and weakness of 
character, he can only judge by having had the same 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 195 

faults to fight with. I myself, for instance, know im- 
patient worl^, and tired work, better than most critics, 
because I am myself always impatient, and often 
tired : so also, the patient and indefatigable touch of 
a mighty master becomes more wonderful to me than 
to others. Yet, wonderful in no mean measure it will 
be to you all, ^vhen I make it manifest ; and as soon 
as we begin our real work, and you have learned what 
it is to draw a true line, I shall be able to make mani- 
fest to you — and undisputably so — that the day's 
work of a man like Mantegna or Paul Veronese con- 
sists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted succession of 
movements of the hand more precise than those of the 
finest fencer ; the pencil leaving one point and arriv- 
ing at another, not only with unerring precision at the 
extremity of the line, but with an unerring, and yet 
varied course — sometimes over spaces a foot or more in 
extent — yet a course so determined everywhere that 
either of these men could, and Veronese often does, 
draw a finished profile, or any other portion of the 
contour of a face, with one line, not afterward 
changed. Try, first, to realize to yourselves the mus- 
cular precision of that action, and the intellectual 
strain of it ; for the movement of a fencer is perfect in 
practised monotony ; but the movement of the hand of 
a great painter is at every instant governed by direct 
and new intention. Then imagine that muscular firm- 
ness and subtlety, and the instantaneously selective 



196 LWTORES Oif Am 

and ordinant energy or the brain, sustained all daj^ 
long, not only without fatigue, but with a visible joy 
in the exertion, like that which an eagle seems to take 
in the wave of his wings; and this all life long, and 
through long life, not only without failure of power, 
but with visible increase of it, until the actually or- 
ganic changes of old age. And then consider, so far 
as you know anything of physiology, what sort of an 
ethical state of body and mind that means — ethic 
through ages past ! What fineness of race there must 
be to get it, what exquisite balance and symmetry of 
the vital powers! And then, finally determine for 
yourselves whether a manhood like that is consistent 
with any viciousness of soul, with any mean anxiety, 
any gnawing lust, any wretchedness of spite or re- 
morse, any consciousness of rebellion against law of 
God or man, or any actual, though unconscious, viola- 
tion of even the least law to which obedience is es- 
sential for the glory of life, and the pleasing of its 
Giver. 

72. It is, of course, true that many of the strong 
masters had deep faults of character, but their faults 
always show in their work. It is true that some could 
not govern their passions ; if so, the}^ died young, or 
they painted ill when old. But the greater part of 
our misapprehension in the whole matter is from our 
not having well known who the great painters were, 
and taking delight in the petty skill that was bred in 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 197 

the fumes of the taverns of the north, instead of 
theirs who breathed empyreal air, sons of the morn- 
ing, underneath the woods of Assisi and the crags of 
Cad ore. 

73. It is true, however also, as I have pointed out 
long ago, that the strong masters fall into two great 
divisions, one leading simple and natural lives, the 
other restrained in a Puritanism of the worship of 
beauty ; and these two manners of life you may recog- 
nize in a moment by their work. Generally the nat- 
uralists are the strongest; but there are two of the 
Puritans, whose work if I can succeed in making 
clearly understandable to you during my three yfears 
here, it is all I need care to do. But of these two Pu- 
ritans one I cannot name to you, and the other I at 
present will not. One I cannot, for no one knows his 
name, except the baptismal one, Bernard, or "dear 
little Bernard "—Bernardino, called, from his birth- 
place (Luino, on the lago Maggiore), Bernard of 
Luino. The ether is a Venetian, of whom many of 
you probably have never heard, and of whom, through 
me, you shall not hear until I have tried to get some 
picture by him over to England. 

74. Observe then, this Puritanism in the worship 
of beauty, though sometimes weak, is always honorable 
and amiable, and the exact reverse of the false Puri- 
tanism, which consists in the dread or disdain of beauty. 
And in order to treat my subject rightly, I ought to 



198 LECTURES ON ART, 

proceed from the skill of art to the choice of its sub 
ject, and show you how the moral temper of the work- 
man is shown by his seeking lovely forms and thoughts 
to express, as well as by the force of his hand in ex- 
pression. But I need not now urge this part of the 
proof on you, because you are already, I believe, suf- 
ficiently conscious of the truth in this matter, and also 
I have already said enough of it in my writings ; 
whereas I have not at all said enough of the infallible- 
ness of fine technical work as a proof of every othei 
good power. And indeed it was long before I myself 
understood the true meaning of the pride of the greatest 
men in their mere execution, shown,f or a permanent les- 
son to us, in the stories which, whether true or not, indi- 
cate with absolute accuracy the general conviction of 
great artists ; the stories of the contest of Apelles and 
Protogenes in a line only (of which I can promise 
you, you shall know the meaning to some purpose in 
a little while) — the story of the circle of Giotto, and 
especially, which you may perhaps not have observed, 
the expression of Dtirer in his inscription on the draw- 
ings sent him by Raphael. " These figures," he says, 
" Raphael drew and sent to Albert Durer in Ntirnberg, 
to show him" — what? l^ot his invention, nor his 
beauty of expression, but " sein Hand zu weisen^'' " to 
show him his TiandP And you will find, as you exam- 
ine farther, that all inferior artists are continually 
trying to escape from the necessity of sound work, 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 19 3 

and either indulging themselves in their delights in 
subject, or pluming themselves on their noble motives 
for attempting what they cannot perform (and ob- 
serve, by the way, that a great deal of what is mis- 
taken for conscientious motive is nothing but a very 
pestilent, because very subtle, condition of vanity); 
whereas the great men always understand at once that 
the first morality of a painter, as of everybody else, is 
to know his business ; and so earnest are they in this, 
that many, whose lives you would think, by the results 
of their work, had been passed in strong emotion, have 
in reality subdued themselves, though capable of the 
very strongest passions, into a calm as absolute as that 
of a deeply sheltered mountain lake, which reflects 
every agitation of the clouds in the sky, and every 
change of the shadows on the hills, but is itself 
motionless. 

Y5. Finally, you must remember that great obscur- 
ity has been brought upon the truth in this matter by 
the want of integrity and simplicity in our modern 
life. I mean integrity in the Latin sense, wholeness. 
Everything is broken up, and mingled in confusion, 
both in our habits and thoughts; besides being in 
great part imitative : so that you not only cannot tell 
what a man is, but sometimes you cannot tell whether 
he is, at all ! — whether you have indeed to do with a 
spirit, or only with an echo. And thus the same in- 
consistencies appear now, between the wgrk of artists 



200 LECTURES ON ART. 

of merit and their personal characters, as those which 
you find continually disappointing expectation in the 
the lives of men of modern literary power — the same 
conditions of society having obscured or misdirected 
the best qualities of the imagination, both in our litera- 
ture and art. Thus there is no serious question with 
any of us as to the personal character of Dante and 
Giotto, of Shakespeare and Holbein ; but we pause 
timidly in the attempt to analyze the moral laws of 
the art skill in recent poets, novelists, and painters. 

76. Let me assure you once for all, that as you grow 
older,if you enable yourselves to distinguish by the truth 
of your own lives, what is true in those of other men 
you will gradually perceive that all good has its origin 
in good, never in evil ; that the fact of either literature 
or painting being truly fine of their kind, whatever 
their mistaken aim or partial error, is proof of their 
noble origin : and that, if there is indeed sterling value 
in the thing done, it has come of a sterling worth in 
the soul that did it, however alloyed or defiled by con- 
ditions of sin which are sometimes more appalling or 
more strange than those which all may detect in their 
own hearts, because they are part of a personality al- 
together larger than ours, and as far beyond our judg- 
ment in its darkness as beyond our following in its 
light. And it is sufiicient warning against what some 
might dread as the probable effect of such a conviction 
on your own minds, namely, that you might permit 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 201 

yourselves in the weaknesses which you imagined to be 
allied to genius, when they took the form of personal 
temptations — it is surely, I say, suiRcient warning 
against so mean a folly, to discern, as you may with 
little pains, that, of all human existences, the lives of 
men of that distorted and tainted nobility of intellect 
are prooably the most miserable. 

77. I pass to the second, and for us the more prac- 
tically important question. What is the effect of noble 
art upon other men ; what has it done for national 
morality in time past ; and what effect is the extended 
knowledge or possession of it likely to have upon us 
now ? And here we are at once met by the facts, 
which are as gloomy as indisputable, that, while many 
peasant populations, among whom scarcely the rudest 
practice of art has ever been attempted, have lived in 
comparative innocence, honor, and happiness, the 
worst foulness and cruelty of savage tribes have been 
frequently associated with fine ingenuities of decora- 
tive design ; also, that no people has ever attained the 
higher stages of art skill, except at a period of its civi- 
lization which was sullied by frequent, violent, and 
even monstrous crime ; and lastly, that the attaining 
of perfection in art power, has been hitherto, in every 
nation, the accurate signal of the beginning of its 
ruin. 

78. Eespecting which phenomena, observe first, 
that although good never springs out of evil, it is de- 



203 LECTURES ON ART, 

veloped to its highest by contention with evil. There 
are some groups of peasantry, in far away nooks of 
Christian countries who are nearly as innocent as 
lambs ; but the morality which gives power to art is 
the morality of men, not of cattle. 

Secondly, the virtues of the inhabitants of many 
country districts are apparent, not real ; their lives are 
indeed artless, but not innocent; and it is only the 
monotony of circumstances, and the absence of tempta- 
tion, which prevent the exhibition of evil passions not 
less real because often dormant, nor less foul because 
shown only in petty faults, or inactive malignities. 

79. But you will observe also that dbsohtte artless- 
ness, to men in any kind of moral health, is impossible; 
they have always, at least, the art by which they live 
— agriculture or seamanship ; and in these industries, 
skillfully practised, you will find the law of their moral 
training ; while, whatever the adversity of circum- 
stances, every rightly-minded peasantry, such as that 
of Sweden, Denmark, Bavaria, or Switzerland, has as- 
sociated with its needful industry a quite studied school 
of pleasurable art in dress ; and generally also in song, 
and simple domestic architecture. 

80. Again, I need not repeat to you here what I 
endeavored to explain in the first lecture in the book 
I called "- The Two Paths," respecting the arts of sav- 
age races : but I may now note briefly that such arts 
are the result of an intellectual activity which has 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 203 

found no room to expand, and which the tyranny of 
nature or of man has condemned to disease through 
arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, 
nor any other religion conveying some moral help, has 
reached, the animal energy of such races necessarily 
flames into ghastly conditions of evil, and the grotesque 
or frightful forms assumed by their art are precisely 
indicative of their distorted moral nature. 

81. But the truly great nations nearly always be- 
gin from a race possessing this imaginative power; 
and for some time their progress is very slow, and 
their state not one of innocence, but of feverish and 
faultful animal energy. This is gradually subdued 
and exalted into bright human life ; the art instinct 
purifying itself with the rest of the nature, until social 
perfectness is nearlj^ reached; and then comes the 
period when conscience and intellect are so highly de- 
veloped, that new forms of error begin in the inabil- 
ity to fulfill the demands of the one, or to answer the 
doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of the peo- 
ple is lost ; all kinds of hypocrisies and oppositions of 
science devolop themselves ; their faith is questioned 
on one side, and compromised with on the other ; 
wealth commonly increases at the same period to a de- 
structive extent ; luxury follows ; and the ruin of the 
nation is then certain ; while the arts, all this time, are 
simply, as I said at first, the exponents of each phase 
of its moral state, and no more control it in its poliLi- 



204 LECTURES ON ART. 

cal career than the gleam of the firefly guides its oscil- 
lation. It is true that their most splendid results are 
usually obtained in the swiftness of the power which 
is hurrying to the precipice ; but to lay the charge of 
the catastrophe to the art' by which it is illumined, is 
to find a cause for the cataract in the hues of its iris. 
It is true that the colossal vices belonging to periods 
of great national wealth (for wealth, you will find, is 
tiie real root of all evil) can turn every good gift and 
slvill of nature or of man to evil purpose. If, in such 
times, fair pictures have been misused, how much more 
fair realities ? And if Miranda is immoral to Caliban 
is that Miranda's fault ? 

82. And I could easily go on to trace for you what 
at the moment I speak, is signified, in our own national 
character, by the forms of art, and unhappily also by 
the forms of what is not art, but drExyioiy that exist 
among us. But the more important question is, "What 
will be signified by them ; what is there in us now of 
worth and strength which, under our new and partly 
accidental impulse toward formative labor, may be by 
that expressed, and by that fortified ? 

Would it not be well to know this ? Nay, irrespec- 
tive of all future work, is it not the first thing we 
should want to know, what stuff we are made of— how 
far we are ayaBol or xaxoi — good, or good for nothing ? 
We may all know that, each of ourselves, easily 
enough, if we like to put one grave question well home. 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS, 205 

83. Supposing it were told any of you by a physi- 
cian whose word you could not but trust, that you had 
not more than seven days to live. And suppose also 
that, by the manner of your education it had happened 
to you, as it has happened to many, never to have 
heard of any future state, or not to have credited 
Avhat you heard; and therefore that you had to 
face this fact of the approach of death in its simplicity : 
fearing no punishment for any sin that you might 
have before committed, or in the coming days might 
determine to commit; and having similarly no hope 
of reward for past, or yet possible, virtue ; nor even of 
any consciousness whatever to be left to you, after the 
seventh day had ended, either of the results of your 
acts to those whom you loved, or of the feelings of 
any survivors toward you. Then the manner in which 
you would spend the seven days is an exact measure of 
the morality of your nature. 

84. I know that some of 3^ou, and I believe the 
greater number of you, would, in such a case, spend 
the granted days entirely as you ought. Neither in 
numbering the errors, or deploring the pleasures of 
the past ; nor in grasping at vile good in the present, 
nor vainly lamenting the darkness of the future ; but 
in instant and earnest execution of whatever it might 
be possible for you to accomplish in the time, in setting 
your affairs in order, and in providing for the future 
comfort, and — so far as you might by any message or 



$06 LECTURES ON ART. 

record of yourself, for the consolation — of those whom 
you loved, and by whom you desired to be remem- 
bered, not for your good, but for theirs. How far you 
might fail through human weakness, in shame for 
the past, despair at the little that could in the rem- 
nant of life be accomplished, or the intolerable pain of 
broken affection, would depend wholly on the degree 
in which your nature had been depressed or fortified 
by the manner of your past life. But I think there 
are few of you who would not spend those last days 
better than all that had preceded them. 

85. If you look accurately through the records of 
the lives that have been most useful to humanity, you 
will find that all that has been done best, has been done 
so ; that to the clearest intellects and highest souls — 
to the true children of the father, with whom a thous- 
and years are as one day, their poor seventy years are 
but as seven days. The removal of the shadow of 
death from them to an uncertain, but always narrow, 
distance, never takes away from them their intuition 
of its approach ; the extending to them of a few hours 
more or less of light abates not their acknowledgement 
of the infinitude that must remain to be known beyond 
their knowledge — done beyond their deeds ; the un- 
profitableness of their momentary service is wrought in 
a magnificent despair, and their very honor is be- 
queathed by them for the joy of others, as they lie 
down to their rest, regarding for themselves the voice 
of men no morp 



BELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 207 

86. The best things, I repeat to you, have been 
done thus, and therefore, sorrowfully. But the great- 
est part of the good work of the world is done either 
in pure and unvexed instinct of duty, '' I have stubbed 
Thornaby waste," or else, and better, it is cheerful and 
helpful doing of what the hand finds to do, in surety 
that at evening time, whatsoever is right, the Master 
will give. And that it be worthily done, depends 
wholly on that ultimate quantity of worth which you 
can measure, each in himself, by the test I have just 
given you. For that test, observe, will mark to you 
the precise force, first of your absolute courage, and 
then of the energy in you for the right ordering of 
things, and the kindly dealing with persons. You 
have cut away from these two instincts every selfish or 
common motive, and left nothing but the energies of 
Order and of Love. 

87. Now, where those two roots are set, all the 
other powers and desires find right nourishment, and be- 
come to their own utmost, helpful to others and pleasur- 
able to ourselves. And so far as those two springs of 
action are not in us, all other powers become corrupt 
or dead; even the love of truth, apart from these, hard- 
ens into an insolent and cold avarice of knowledge, 
which unused, is more vain than unused gold. 

88. These, then, are the two essential instincts of 
humanity : The love of Order and the love of Kind- 
ness. By the love of order the moral energy is to deal 



208 LECTURES ON ART. 

with the earth, and to dress it, and keep it ; and with 
all rebellious and dissolute forces in lower creatures, or 
in ourselves. By the love of doing kindness it is to 
deal rightly with all surrounding life. And then, 
grafted on these, we are to make every other passion 
perfect ; so that they may every one have full strength 
and yet be absolutely under control. 

89. Every one must be strong, every one perfect, 
every one obedient as a war horse. And it is among 
the most beautiful pieces of mysticism to which eter- 
nal truth is attached, that the chariot race, which 
Plato uses as an image of moral government, and 
which is indeed the most perfect type of it in any vis- 
ible skill of men, should have been made by the 
Greeks the continual subject of their best poetry and 
best art. Nevertheless, Plato's use of it is not alto- 
gether true. There is no black horse in the chariot of 
the soul. One of the driver's worst faults is in starv- 
ing his horses ; another, in not breaking them early 
enough ; but they are all good. Take, for example, 
one usually thought of as wholly evil — that of anger, 
leading to vengeance. I believe it to be quite one of 
the crowning wickednesses of this age that we have 
starved and chilled our faculty of indignation, and 
neither desire nor dare to punish crimes justly. We 
have taken up the benevolent idea, forsooth, that jus- 
tice is to be preventive instead of vindictive ; and we 
imagine that we are to punish, not in anger, but in ex- 



II 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 209 

pediency ; not that we may give deserved pain to the 
person in fault, but that we may frighten other people 
from committing the sHme fault. The beautiful theory 
of this non-vindictive justice is, that having convicted 
a man of a crime worthy of death, we entirely pardon 
the criminal, restore him to his place in our affection 
and esteem, and then hang him, not as a malefactor, 
but as a scarecrow. That is the theory. And the 
practice is, that we send a child to prison for a month 
for stealing a handful of walnuts, for fear that other 
children should come to steal more of our walnuts. 
And we do not punish a swindler for ruining a thous- 
and families, because we think swindling is a whole- 
some excitement to trade. 

90. But all true justice is vindictive to vice as it is 
rewarding to virtue. Only — and herein it is distin- 
guished from personal revenge — it is vindictive of the 
wrong done, not of the wrong done to us. It is the 
national expression of deliberate anger, as of deliberate 
gratitude ; it is not exemplary, or even corrective, but 
essentially retributive ; it is the absolute art of meas- 
ured recompense, giving honor where honor is due, and 
shame where shame is due, and joy where joy is due, 
and pain where pain is due. It is neither educational, 
for men are to be educated by w^iolesome habit, not 
by rewards and punishments ; nor is it preventive, for 
it is to be executed without regard to any consequences; 
but only for righteousness' sake, a righteous nation 



210 LECTURES ON ART, 

does judgment and justice. But in this, as in all other 
instances, the Tightness of the secondary passion de- 
pends on its being grafted on those two primary in- 
stincts, the love of order and of kindness, so that in- 
dignation itself is against the wounding of love. Do 
you think the nrjni Uxi^oi came of a hard heart in 
Achilles, or the " Pallas te hoc vulnere^ Pallas^'^ of a 
hard heart in Anchises' son ? 

91. And now, if with this clue through the laby- 
rinth of them, you remember the course of the arts of 
great nations, you will perceive that whatever has 
prospered, and become lovely, had its beginning — for 
no other was possible — in the love of order in material 
things associated with true diHaiodvvrj^ and the desire 
of beauty in material things, which is associated with 
true affection, charitas ; and with the innumerable 
conditions of true gentleness expressed b}^ the differ- 
ent uses of the words x«>z? and gratia. You will find 
that this love of beauty is an essential part of all 
healthy human nature, and though it can long co-exist 
with states of life in many other respects unvirtuous, 
it is itself wholly good — the direct adversary of envy, 
avarice, mean worldly care, and especially of cruelty. 
It entirely perishes when these are willfully indulged ; 
and the men in whom it has been most strong have 
always been compassionate, and lovers of justice, and 
the earliest discerners and declarers of things conducive 
to the happiness of mankind. 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 211 

92. Nearly every important truth respecting the 
love of beauty in its familiar relations to human life 
was mythically expressed by the Greeks in their vari- 
ous accounts of the parentage and offices of the Graces. 
But one fact, the most vital of all, they could not in 
its fullness perceive, namely, that the intensity of other 
perceptions of beauty is exactly commensurate with 
the imaginative purity of the passion of love, and with 
the singleness of its devotion. They were not fully 
conscious of, and could not therefore either mythically 
or philosophically express, the deep relation within 
themselves between their power of perceiving beauty, 
and the honor of domestic affection which found their 
sternest themes of tragedy in the infringement of its 
laws — which made the rape of Helen the chief subject 
of their epic poetry, and which fastened their clearest 
symbolism of resurrection on the story of Alcestis. 
Unhappily, the subordinate position of their most re- 
vered women, and the partial corruption of feeling to- 
ward them by the presence of certain other singular 
states of inferior passion which it is as difficult as 
grievous to analyze, arrested the ethical as well as the 
formative progress of the Greek mind ; and it was not 
until after an interval of nearly two thousand years of 
various error and pain, that, partly as the true reward 
of Christian warfare nobly sustained through centuries 
of trial, and partly as the visionary culmination of the 
faith which saw in a maiden's purity the link between 



212 LECTURES ON ART. 

God and her race, the highest and holiest strength of 
mortal love was reached ; and, together with it, in the 
song of Dante, and the painting of Bernard of Luino 
and his fellows, the perception, and embodiment for- 
ever of whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things 
are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; that, 
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, men 
mio:ht think on those thino^s. 

93. You probably observed the expression I used a 
moment ago, the imaginative purity of the passion of 
love. I have not yet spoken, nor is it possible for me 
to-day to speak adequately, of the moral power of the 
imagination ; but you may for yourselves enough dis- 
cern its nature merely by comparing the dignity of 
the relations between the sexes, from their lowest level 
in moths or moUusca, through the higher creatures in 
whom they become a domestic influence and law, up 
to the love of pure men and women ; and, finally, to 
the ideal love which animated chivalry. Throughout 
this vast ascent it is the gradual increase of the im- 
aginative faculty which exalts and enlarges the author- 
ity of the passion until, at its height, it is the bulwark 
of patience, the tutor of honor, and the perfectness of 
praise. 

94. You will find farther, that as of love, so of all 
the other passions, the right government and exaltation 
begins in that of the imagination, which is lord over 
them. For to subdue the passions, which is thought 



A 



RELA TION OF ART TO MORALS. 213 

SO often to be the sum of duty respecting them, is pos- 
sible enough to a proud dullness ; but to excite them 
rightly, and make them strong for good, is the work 
of the unselfish imagination. It is constantly said that 
human nature is heartless. Do not believe it. Human 
nature is kind and generous; but it is narrow and 
blind ; and can only with difficulty conceive anything 
but what it immediately sees and feels. People would 
instantly care for others as well as themselves if only 
they could imagine others as well as themselves. Let 
a child fall into the river before the roughest man's 
eyes ; he will usually do what he can to get it out, even 
at some risk to himself; and all the town will triumph 
in the saving of one little life. Let the same man be 
shown that hundreds of children are dying of fever for 
want of some sanitary measure which it will cost him 
trouble to urge, and he will make no effort; and prob- 
ably all the town Avould resist him if he did. So, also, 
the lives of many deserving women are passed in a 
succession of petty anxieties about themselves, and 
gleaning of minute interests and mean pleasures ia 
their immediate circle, because they are never taught 
to make any effort to look beyond it ; or to know any- 
thing about the mighty world in which their lives 
are fading, like blades of bitter grass in fruitless 
fields. 

95. I had intended to enlarge on this — and yet 
more on the kingdom which every man holds in his 



214 LECTURES ON ART. 

conceptive faculty, to be peopled with active thoughts 
and lovely presences, or left waste for the springing 
up of those dark desires and dreams of which it is 
written that "every imagination of the thoughts of 
man's heart is evil continually." True, and a thous- 
and times true it is, that here at least, " greater is he 
that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city." 
But this you can partly follow out for yourselves with- 
out help, partly we must leave it for future inquiry. 
I press to the conclusion which I wish to leave with 
you, that all you can rightly do, or honorably become 
depends on the government of these two instincts of 
order and kindness, by this great imaginative faculty, 
which gives you inheritance of the past, grasp of the 
present, authority over the future. Map out the spaces 
of your possible lives by its help ; measure the range 
of their possible agency ! On the walls and towers of 
this your fair city, there is not an ornament of which 
the first origin may not be traced back to the thoughts 
of men who died two thousand years ago. Whom will 
you be governing by your thoughts, two thousand 
years hence ? Think of it, and you will find that so 
far from art being immoral, little else except art is 
moral ; that life without industry is guilt, and industry 
without art is brutality ; and for the words " good " 
and " wicked " used of men, you may almost substi- 
tute the words " makers " or " destroyers." Far the 
greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, 



ii 



RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 215 

SO far as our present knowledge extends, vain : wholly 
useless for any kind of good, but having assigned to it 
a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sor- 
row. Its stress is only the stress of wandering 
storm ; its beauty the hectic of plague : and 
what is called the history of mankind is too often the 
record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading 
of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow 
spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of 
every man, ''qui non acce-pit in vanitatem anhnain suam'''' 
endures and prospers ; a small remnant or green bud 
of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint 
with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true work- 
ers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden 
ground ; by the help of their joined hands the order of 
all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded, and 
although with strange vacillation, in the eyes of the 
watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night, there 
is no hour of human existence that does not draw on 
toward the perfect day. 

96. And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all 
men understood that the beauty of holiness must be in 
labor as well as in rest, l^ay, 7yiore, if it may be, in 
labor ; in our strength, rather than in our weakness ; 
and in the choice of what we shall work for through 
the six days, and may know to be good at their even- 
ing time, than in the choice of what we pray for on 
the seventh, of reward or repose. With the multitude 



216 LECTURES ON ART. 

that keep holiday, we may perhaps sometimes vainly 
have gone up to the house of the Lord, and vainly 
there asked for what we fancied would be mercy ; but 
for the few who labor as their Lord would have them 
the mercy needs no seeking, and their wide home no 
hallowing. Surely goodness and mercy shall folloio 
them all the days of their life ; and they shall dwell 
in the house of the Lord — forever. 



J 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 217 



LECTURE lY. 

THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 

97. Our subject of inquiry to-day, you will remem- 
ber, is the mode in which fine art is founded upon, or 
may contribute to the practical requirements of 
human life. 

Its offices in this respect are mainly two-fold; it 
gives form to knowledge, and grace to utility ; that 
is to say, it makes permanently visible to us things 
which otherwise could neither be described by our 
science, nor retained by our memory ; and it gives 
delightfulness and worth to the implements of daily 
use, and materials of dress, furniture and lodging. In 
the first of these offices it gives precision and charm 
to truth ; in the second it gives precision and charm to 
service. For, the moment we make anything useful 
thoroughly, it is a law of nature that we shall be pleased 
with ourselves, and with the thing we have made ; and 
become desirous therefore to adorn or complete it, in 
some dainty way, with finer art expressive of our 
pleasure. 

And the point I wish chiefly to bring before you to- 



218 LECTURES ON ART, 

day, is this close and healthy connection of the fine 
arts with material use ; but I must first try briefly to 
put in clear light the function of art in giving form to 
truth. 

98. Much that I have hitherto tried to teach has 
been disputed on the ground that I have attached too 
much importance to art as representing natural facts, 
and too little to it as a source of pleasure. And I 
wish, in the close of these four prefatory lectures, 
strongly to assert to you, and, so far as I can in the 
time, convince you, that the entire vitality of art de- 
pends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; 
and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive 
it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and 
tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of 
these main objects — either to state a true thing, or to 
adorn a serviceaUe one. It must never exist alone — 
never for itself ; it exists rightly only when it is the 
means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life. 

99. Kow, I pray you to observe — for though I have 
said this often before, I have never yet said it clearly 
enough — every good piece of art, to whichever of 
these ends it may be directed, involves first essentially 
the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an 
actually beautiful thing by it. 

Skill and beauty, always, then; and. beyond these, 
the formative arts have always one or other of the 
two objects which I have just defined to you — truth, 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 219 

or serviceableness ; and without these aims neither the 
skill nor their beauty will avail ; only by these can 
either legitimately reign. All the graphic arts begin 
in keeping the outline of shadow that we have loved, 
and they end in giving to it the aspect of life ; and all 
the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the cnp 
and the platter, and they end in a glorified roof. 

Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have 
skill, beauty and likeness ; and in the architectural arts 
skill, beauty and use : and you must have the three in 
each group, balanced and co-ordinate ; and all the 
chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating 
one of these elements. 

100. For instance, almost the whole system and 
hope of modem life are founded on the notion that 
you may substitute mechanism for skill, photograph 
for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main 
nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you 
can get everything by grinding — music, literature and 
painting. You will find it grievously not so ; you can 
get nothing but dust by mere grinding. Even to have 
the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley 
first ; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But 
essentially, we have lost our delight in skill ; in that 
majesty of it which I was trying to make clear to you 
in my last address, and which long ago 1 tried to ex- 
press, under the head of ideas of power. The entire 
sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do 



220 LECTURES ON ART. 

not take pains enough to do right, and have no concep 
tion of what the right costs ; so that all the joy and 
reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man's 
work, have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little 
in looking at a honeycomb or a bird's nest ; we under- 
stand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from a 
lamp of wax^ or a cluster of sticks. But a picture, 
which is a much more wonderful thing than a honey- 
comb or a bird's nest — have we not known people, and 
sensible people, too, who expected to be taught to pro- 
duce that, in six lessons? 

101. Well, you must have the skill, you must have 
the beauty, which is the highest moral element; and 
then, lastly, you must have the verity or utility, which 
is not the moral, but the vital element; and this 
desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three 
that always leads in great schools, and in the minds of 
great masters, without any exception. They will permit 
themselves in awkwardness, they will permit them- 
selves in ugliness — but they will never permit them- 
selves in uselessness or in unveracity. 

102. And farther, as their skill increases, and as 
their grace, so much more their desire for truth. It is 
impossible to find the three motives in fairer 
balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. 
He rejoices in showing you his skill ; and those of 
you who succeed in learning what painters' work 
really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 221 

— that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, 
in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which 
strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the 
wind strikes it on the sea. He rejoices in all abstract 
beauty and rhythm and melody of design ; he will 
never give you a color that is not lovely, nor a shade 
that is unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But 
all his power and all his invention are held by him sub- 
ordinate — and the more obediently because of their 
nobleness — to his true leading purpose of setting be- 
fore you such likeness of the living presence of an 
English gentleman or an English lady, as shall be 
worthy of being looked upon forever. 

103. But farther, you remember, I hope — for I said 
it in a way that I thought would shock you a little, 
that you might remember it — my statement, that art 
had never done more than this, never more than given 
the likeness of a noble human being. Not only so, 
but it very seldom does so much as this, and the best 
pictures that exist of the great schools are all por- 
traits, or groups of portraits, often of very simple and 
nowise noble persons. You may have much more 
brilliant and impressive qualities in imaginative pict- 
ures; you may have figures scattered like clouds, or 
garlanded like flowers; you may have light and shade 
as of a tempest, and color, as of the rainbow ; but all 
that is child's play to the great men, though it is 
astonishment to us. Their real strength is tried to the 



222 LEGTURES ON ART. 

utmost, and as far as I know, it is never elsewhere 
brought out so thoroughly, as in painting one man or 
woman, and the soul that was in them ; nor that 
always the highest soul, but often only a thwarted 
one that was capable of height ; or, perhaps, not even 
that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the 
poor best of it, by the masterful sight. So that in 
order to put before you in your standard series the best 
art possible, I am obliged, even from the very strong- 
est men, to take the portraits, before I take the ideal- 
ism. IS'ay, whatever is best in the great compositions 
themselves has depended on portraiture ; and the study 
necessary to enable you to understand invention will 
also convince you that the mind of man never invented 
a greater thing than the form of man, animated by 
faithful life. Every attempt to refine or exalt such 
healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it; or 
else consists only in giving it, to please our fancy, the 
wings of birds, or the eyes of antelopes. "Whatever 
is truly great in either Greek or Christian art, is also 
restrictedly human ; and even the raptures of the re- 
deemed souls who enter " celesteme7ite hallando^'' the 
gate of Angelico's Paradise, were seen first in the ter- 
restrial, yet most pure, mirth of Florentine maidens. 

104. I am aware that this cannot but at present 
appear gravely questionable to those of my audience 
who are strictly cognizant of the phases of Greek art ; 
for they know that the moment of its decline is accu- 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 223 

ratel}^ marked, by its turning from abstract form to 
portraiture. But the reason of this is simple. The 
progressive course of Greek art was in subduing mon- 
strous conceptions to natural ones ; it did this by gen- 
eral laws ; it reached absolute truth of generic human 
form, and if its ethical force had remained, would have 
advanced into healthy portraiture. But at the mo- 
ment of change the national life ended in Greece ; and 
portraiture, there, meant insult to her religion, and 
flattery to her tyrants. And her skill perished, not 
because she became true in sight, but because she be- 
came vile in heart. 

105. And now let us think of our own work, and 
ask how that may become, in its own poor measure, 
active in some verity of representation. We certainly 
cannot begin by drawing kings or queens ; but we 
must try, even in our earliest work, if it is to prosper, 
to draw something that will convey true knowledge 
both to ourselves and others. And I think you will 
find, greatest advantage in the endeavor to give more 
life and educational power to the simpler branches of 
natural science ; for the great scientific men are all so 
eager in advance that they have no time to popularize 
their discoveries, and if we can glean after them a little 
and make pictures of the things which science de- 
scribes, we shall find the service a worthy one. Not 
only so, but we may even be helpful to science her- 
self ; for she has suffered by her proud severance from 



224 LEGTURES ON ART. 

the arts; and having made too little effort to 
realize her discoveries to vulgar eyes, has herself 
lost true measure of what was chiefly precious in 
them. 

106. Take botany, for instance. Our scientific 
botanists are, I think, chiefly at present occupied in 
distinguishing species, which perfect methods of dis- 
tinction will probably in the future show to be indis- 
tinct ; in inventing descriptive names of which a more 
advanced science and more fastidious scholarship will 
show some to be unnecessary, and others inadmissible; 
and in microscopic investigations of structure, which 
through many alternate links of triumphant discovery 
that tissue is composed of vessels and that vessels are 
composed of tissue, have not hitherto completely ex- 
plained to us either the origin, the energy, or the 
course of the sap ; and which, however subtle or suc- 
cessful, bear to the real natural history of plants only 
the relation that anatomy and organic chemistry bear 
to the history of men. In the meantime, our 
artists are so generally convinced of the truth of 
the Darwinian theory, that they do not always think 
it necessary to show any difference between the foli- 
age of an elm and an oak ; and the gift-books of Christ 
mas have every page surrounded with laboriously en- 
graved garlands of rose, shamrock, thistle, and forget- 
me-not, without its being thought proper by the 
draughtsmen, or desirable by the public, even in the 






RELATION OF ART TO USE. 225 

case of those uncommon flowers, to observe the real 
shape of the petals of any one of them. 

107. ]^ow what we especially need at present for edu- 
cational purposes is to know, not the anatomy of plants, 
but their biography — how and where they live and 
die, their tempers, benevolences, malignities, dis- 
tresses, and virtues. We want them drawn from 
their youth to their age, from bud to fruit. We 
ought to see the various forms of their diminished 
but hardy growth in cold climates, or poor soils ; and 
their rank or wild luxuriance, when full-fed and 
warmly nursed. And all this we ought to have 
drawn so accurately, that we might at once compare 
any given part of a plant with the same part of any 
other, drawn on the like conditions, l^ow, is not this 
a work which we may set about here in Oxford, with 
good hope and much pleasure ? I think it so impor- 
tant, that the first exercise in drawing I shall put be- 
fore you will be an outline of a laurel leaf. You will 
find in the opening sentence of Lionardo's treatise, our 
present text-book, that you must not at first draw 
from nature, but from a good master's work, ^'per 
assuefarsi a huone m.emhra,^'^ to accustom yourselves, 
that is, to entirely good representative organic forms. 
So your first exercise shall be the top of the laurel 
sceptre of Apollo, drawn by an Italian engraver of 
Lionardo's own time; then we will draw a laurel 
leaf itself ; and little by little, I think we may both 



226 LECTURES ON ART. 

learn ourselves, and teach to many besides, somewhat 
more than we know yet, of the wild olives of Greece, 
and the wild roses of England. 

108. IText, in geology, which I will take leave to 
consider as an entirely separate science from the zool- 
ogy of the past, which has lately usurped its name and 
interest. In geology itself we find the strength of 
many able men occupied in debating questions of 
which there are yet no data even for the clear state- 
ment ; and in seizing advanced theoretical positions on 
the mere contingency of their being afterward ten- 
able; while, in the meantime, no simple person, taking 
a holiday in Cumberland, can get an intelligible sec- 
tion of Skiddaw, or a clear account of the origin of 
the Skiddaw slates ; and while, though half the edu- 
cated society of London travel every summer over the 
great plain of Switzerland, none know, or care to 
know, why that is a plain, and the Alps to the south 
of it are Alps: and whether or not the gravel of the 
one has anything to do with the rocks of the other. 
And though every palace in Europe owes part of its 
decoration to variegated marbles, and nearly every 
woman in Europe part of her decoration to pieces of 
jasper or chalcedony, I do not think any geologist 
could at this moment with authority, tell us either 
how a piece of marble is stained, or what causes the 
streaks in a Scotch pebble. 

109. Now, as soon as you have obtained the 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 227 

power of drawing", I do not say a mountain, but even 
a stone accurately, every question of this kind 
will become to you at once attractive and definite ; 
you will find that in the grain, the luster, and the 
cleavage-lines of the smallest fragment of rock, there 
are recorded forces of every order and magnitude, 
from those which raise a continent by one volcanic 
effort, to those which at every instant are polishing 
the apparently complete crystal in its nest, and con- 
ducting the apparently motionless metal in its vein ; 
and that only by the art of your ovrn hand, and fidel- 
ity of sight which it develops, you can obtain true 
perception of these invincible and inimitable arts of 
the earth herself: while the comparatively slight effort 
necessary to obtain so much skill as may serviceably 
draw mountains in distant effect will be instantly re- 
warded by what is almost equivalent to a new sense of 
the conditions of their structure. 

110. And, because it is well at once to know some 
direction in which our work may be definite, let me 
suggest to those of you who may intend passing their 
vacation in Switzerland, and who care about moun- 
tains, that if they will first qualify themselves to take 
angles of position and elevation with correctness, and 
to draw outlines with approximate fidelity, there are a 
series of problems of the highest interest to be worked 
out on the southern edge of the Swiss plain, in the 
study of the relations of its molasse beds to the rocks 



228 LECTURES ON ART, 

which are characteristically developed in the chain of 
the Stockhorn, Beatenberg, Pilate, Mythen above 
Schwytz, and High Sentis of Appenzell; the pursuit 
of which may lead them into many pleasant, as well 
as creditably dangerous walks, and curious discoveries; 
and will be good for the discipline of their fingers in 
the penciling of crag form. 

111. I wish I could ask you to draw, instead of the 
Alps, the crests of Parnassus and Olympus, and the 
ravines of Delphi and of Tempe. I have not loved the 
arts of Greece as others have ; yet I love them, and 
her, so much, that it is to me simply a standing mar- 
vel how scholars can endure for all these centuries dur- 
ing which their chief education has been in the lan- 
guage and policy of Greece, to have only the names of 
her hills and rivers upon their lips, and never one line 
of conception of them in their minds' sight. Which of 
us knows what the valley of Sparta is like, or the great 
mountain vase of Arcadia ? which of us, except in mere 
airy syllabling of names, knows aught of "sandy 
Ladon's lilied banks, or old Lycaeus, or Cyllene hoar ? " 
" You cannot travel in Greece ? " I know it ; nor in 
Magna Graecia. But, gentlemen of England, you had 
better find out why you cannot, and put an end to that 
horror of European shame, before you hope to learn 
Greek art. 

112. I scarcely know whether to place among the 
things useful to art, or to science, the systematic 



I 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 229 

record, by drawing, of phenomena of the sky. But I 
am quite sure that your work cannot in any direction 
be more useful to yourselves, than in enabling you to 
perceive the quite unparalleled subtilties of color and 
inorganic form, which occur on any ordinarily fine 
morning or evening horizon ; and I will even confess 
to you another of my perhaps too sanguine expec- 
tations, that in some far distant time it may come to 
pass, that young Englishmen and Englishwomen may 
think the breath of the morning sky pleasanter than 
that of midnight, and its light prettier than that of 
candles. 

113. Lastly, m zoology. What the Greeks did for 
the horse, and what, as far as regards domestic and 
expressional character, Landseer has done for the dog 
and the deer, remains to be done by art for nearly all 
other animals of high organization. There are few 
birds or beasts that have not a range of character 
which, if not equal to that of the horse or dog, is yet 
as interesting within narrower limits, and often in 
grotesqueness, intensity, or wild and timid pathos, 
more singular and mysterious. Whatever love of 
humor you have — whatever sympathy with imperfect, 
but most subtle feeling — whatever perception of sub- 
limity in conditions of fatal power, may here find 
fullest occupation ; all these being joined, in the strong 
animal races, to a variable and fantastic beauty far 
beyond anything that merely formative art has yet 



230 LEVTUMES ON ART. 

conceived. I have placed in your educational series a 
wing by Albert DUrer, which goes as far as art yet 
has reached in delineation of plumage ; while for the 
simple action of the pinion, it is impossible to go be- 
yond what has been done already by Titian and Tin- 
toret ; but you cannot so much as once look at the ruf- 
flings of the plumes of a pelican pluming itself after 
it has been in the water, or carefully draw the con 
tours of the wing either of a vulture or a common 
swift, or paint the rose and vermillion on that of a 
flamingo, without receiving almost a new conception 
of the meaning of form and color in creation. 

114. Lastly. Your work, in all directions I have 
hitherto indicated, may be as deliberate as you choose; 
there is no immediate fear of the extinction of many 
species of flowers or animals ; and the Alps, and val- 
ley of Sparta will wait your leisure, I fear, too long. 
But the fuedal and monastic buildings of Europe, and 
still more the streets of her ancient cities, are vanish- 
ing like dreams : and it is difficult to imagine the min- 
gled envy and contempt with which future genera- 
tions will look back to us, who still possessed such 
things, yet made no effort to preserve, and scarcely 
any to delineate them ; for, when used as material of 
landscape by the modern artist, they are nearly al- 
ways superficially or flatteringly represented, without 
zeal enough to penetrate their character, or patience 
enough to render it in modest harmony. As for places 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 231 

of traditional interest, I do not know an entirely faith- 
ful drawing of any historical site, except one or two 
studies made by enthusiastic young painters in Pales- 
tine and Egypt : for which, thanks to them always ; 
but we want work nearer home. 

115. Now, it is quite probable that some of you, 
who will not care to go through the labor necessary to 
draw flowers or animals, may yet have pleasure in at- 
taining some moderately accurate skill of sketching 
architecture, and greater pleasure still in directing it 
usefully. Suppose, for instance, we were to take up 
the historical scenery in Carlyle's " Frederick." Too 
justly the historian accuses the genius of past art, in 
that, types of too many such elsewhere, the galleries of 
Berlin, " are made up, like other galleries, of goat-footed 
Pan,Europa's Bull, Romulus' She- Wolf, and the Cor- 
reggiosity of Correggio, and contain, for instance, no 
portrait of Friedrich the Great, no likeness at all, or next 
to none at all, of the noble seriesof Human Realities, 
or of any part of them, who have sprung, not from the 
idle brains of dreaming dilettanti^ but from the head 
of God Almighty, to make this poor authentic earth 
a little memorable for us, and to do a little work that 
may be eternal there." So Carlyle tells us — too 
truly ! We cannot now draw Friedrich for him, but 
we can draw some of the old castles and cities that 
were the cradles of German life — Hohenzollern, 
Hapsburg, Marburg, and such others \ we may keep 



232 LEGTURES ON ART. 

some authentic likeness of these for the future. 
Suppose we were to take up that first volume of 
" Friedrich," and put outlines to it ? shall we begin by 
looking for Henry the Fowler's tomb— Carlyle him- 
self asks if he has any — at Quedlinburg, and so down- 
ward, rescuing what we can ? That would certainly 
be making our work of some true use. 

116. But I have told you enough, it seems to me, 
at least to-day, of this function of art in recording 
fact ; let me now finally, and with all distinctness 
possible to me, state to you its main business of all ; 
its service in the actual uses of daily life. 

You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this its 
main business. That is indeed so, however. The 
giving brightness to picture is much, but the giving 
brightness to life more. And remember, were it as 
patterns only, you cannot, without the realities, have 
the pictures. You cannot have a landscape by Turner 
without a country for him to paint ; you cannot have 
a portrait by Titian, without a man to be portrayed. 
I need not prove that to you, I suppose, in these 
short terms ; but in the outcome I can get no soul to 
believe that the beginning of art is in getting our 
country clean and our people beautiful. I have been 
ten years trying to get this very plain certainty — I do 
not say beheved— but even thought of, as anything 
but a monstrous proposition. To get your country 
clean, ^nd your people lovely ; I assure you, that is a 



J 



RELATION OF ART TO USE, 233 

necessary work of art to begin with I There has in- 
deed been art in countries where people lived in dirt 
to serve God, but never in countries wnere they lived 
in dirt to serve the devil. There has indeed been art 
Tvhere the people w^ere not all lovely — where even 
their lips were thick — and their skins black, because 
the sun had looked upon them ; but never m a country 
where the people were pale with miserable toil and 
deadly shade, and where the lips of youth, instead of 
being full with blood, were pinched by famine, or 
warped with poison. And now, therefore, note this 
well, the gist of all these long prefatory talks. I said 
that the two great moral instincts were those of Or- 
der and Kindness. J^ow. all the arts are founded on 
agriculture by the hand, and on the graces, and kind- 
ness of feeding and dressing, and lodging your people* 
Greek art begins the gardens of Alcinous — perfect 
order, leeks in beds, and fountains in pipes. And 
Christian art, as it arose out of chivalry, was only 
possible so far as chivalry compelled both kings and 
knights to care for the right personal training of theii 
people; it perished utterly when those kings and 
knights became dr^jno/Sopoi, devourers of the people. And 
it will become possible again only, Avhen literally, the 
sword is beaten into the plowshare, when your St. 
George of England shall justify his name, and Chris^ 
tian art shall be known as its Master was, in breaking 
of bread. 



I 



234 LECTURES ON ART, 

117. Kow look at the working out of this broad 
principle in minor detail ; observe how, from highest 
to lowest, health of art has first depended on reference 
to industrial use. There is first the need of cup and 
platter, especially of cup ; for you can put your meat 
on the Harpies', or any other tables ; but you must 
have your cup to drink from. And to hold it conven- 
iently, you must put a handle to it ; and to fill it when 
it is empty you must have a large pitcher of some sort; 
and to carry the pitcher you may most advisably have 
two handles. Modify the forms of these needful pos- 
sessions according to the various requirements of drink- 
ing largely and drinking delicately ; of pouring easily 
out, or of keeping for years the perfume in ; of storing 
in cellars, or bearing from fountains; of sacrificial 
libation of Pan, athenaic treasure of oil, and sepul- li 
chral treasure of ashes — and you have a resultant series 

of beautiful form and decoration, from the rude am- 
phora of red earth up to Cellini's vases of gems and 
crystal, in which series, but especially in the more 
simple conditions of it, are developed the most beauti- 
ful lines and most perfect types of severe composition 
which have yet been attained by art. 

118. But again, that you may fill your cup with 
pure water, you must go to the well or spring ; you 
need a fence round the well ; you need some tube or 
trough, or other means of confining the stream at the 
spring. For the conveyance of the current to any dis- 



RELATION OF ART TO USE, 235 

tance you must build either inclosed or open aqueduct; 
and in the hot square of the city where you set it free 
you find it good for health and pleasantness to let it 
leap into a fountain. On these several needs you have 
a school of sculpture founded ; in the decoration of the 
walls of wells in level countries and of the sources of 
springs in mountainous ones, and chiefly of all, where 
the women of household or market meet at the city 
fountain. There is, however, a farther reason for the 
use of art here than in any other material service, so 
far as we may, hj art, express our reverence or thank- 
fulness. Whenever a nation is in its right mind, it 
always has a deep sense of divinity in the gift of rain 
from heaven, filling its heart with food and gladness ; 
and all the more when that gift becomes gentle and 
perennial in the flowing of springs. It literally is not 
possible that any fruitful power of the muses should 
be put forth upon a people which disdains their Heli- 
con ; still less is it possible that any Christian nation 
should grow up " tanqicam lignum quod jplantatum est 
secus decersus aquarmn^'' which cannot recognize the 
lesson meant in their being told of the places where 
Kebekah was met — where Kachel — where Zipporah — ■ 
and she who was asked for water under Mount Gerizim 
by a stranger, weary, who had nothing to draw with. 
119. And truly, when our mountain springs are set 
apart in vale or craggy glen, or glade of wood green 
through the drought of summer, far from cities, theq. 



236 LECTURES ON ART, 

it is best let them stay in their own happy peace ; but 
if near towns, and liable therefore to be defiled by 
common usage, we could not use the loveliest art more 
worthily than by sheltering the spring and its first 
pools with precious marbles; nor ought anything to 
be esteemed more important, as a means of healthy 
education, than the care to keep the streams of it 
afterward, to as great a distance as possible, pure, full 
of fish, and easily accessible to children. There used 
to be, thirty years ago, a little rivulet of the Wandel, 
about an inch deep, which ran over the carriage-road 
and under a foot-bridge just under the last chalk hill 
near Croydon. Alas! men came and went; audit — 
did not go on forever. It has long since been bricked 
over by the parish authorities ; but there was more 
education in that stream with its minnows than you 
could get out of a hundred pounds spent yearly in the 
parish schools, even though you were to spend every 
farthing of it in teaching the nature of oxygen and 
hydrogen, and the names, and rate per minute of all 
the rivers in Asia and America. 

120. Well, the gist of this matter lies here then. 
Suppose we want a school of pottery again in England, 
all we poor artists are ready to do the best we can, to 
show you how pretty a line may be that is twisted 
first to one side and then to the other ; and how a 
plain household blue will make a pattern on white ; 
and how ideal art may be got out of the spaniel's col- 



1 



RELATION OF ART TO TT8E. 237 

ors, of black and tan. But I tell you beforehand, all 
that we can do will be utterly useless, unless you 
teach your peasant to say grace, not only before meat, 
but before drink ; and having provided him with Greek 
cups and platters, provide him also with something 
that is not poisoned to put into them. 

121. There cannot be any need that I should trace 
for you the conditions of art that are directly founded 
on serviceableness of dress, and of armor ; but it is my 
duty to affirm to you, in the most positive manner, 
that after recovering, for the poor, wholesomeness of 
food, your next step toward founding schools of art in 
England must be in recovering, for the poor, decency 
and wholesomeness of dress ; thoroughly good in sub- 
stance, fitted for their daily work, becoming to their 
rank in life, and worn with order and dignity. And 
this order and dignity must be taught them by the 
women of the upper and middle classes, whose minds 
can be in nothing right, as long as they are so wrong 
in this matter as to endure the squalor of the poor, 
while they themselves dress gaily. And on the proper 
pride and comfort of both poor and rich in dress, must be 
founded the true arts of dress ; carried on by masters 
of manufacture no less careful of the perfectness and 
beauty of their tissues, and of all that in substance 
and in design can be bestowed upon them, than ever 
the armorers of Milan and Damascus were careful of 
their steel. 



238 LECTURES ON ART, 

122. Then, in the third place, having recovered some 
wholesome habits of life as to food and dress, we 
must recover them as to lodging. I said just now that 
the best architecture was but a glorified roof. Think 
of it. The dome of the Vatican, the porches of 
Eheims or Chartres, the vaults and arches of their 
aisles, the canopy of the tomb, and the spire of the 
belfry, are all forms resulting from the mere require- 
ment that a certain space shall be strongly covered 
from heat and rain. More than that — as I have tried 
all through "The Stones of Venice" to show — the 
lovely forms of these were every one of them devel- 
oped in civil and domestic building, and only after 
their invention employed ecclesiastically on the grand- 
est scale. I do not know whether you have noticed, 
but I think you cannot but have noticed here in Oxford, 
as elsewhere, that our modern architects never seem 
to know what to do with their roofs. Be assured, un- 
til the roofs are right, nothing else will be ; and there 
are just two ways of keeping them right. Never 
build them of iron, but only of wood or stone ; and 
secondly, take care that in every town the little roofs 
are built before the large ones, and that everybody 
who wants one has got one. And we must try also to 
make everybody want one. That is to say, at some 
not very advanced period of life, men should desire to 
have a home, which they do not wish to quit any more, 
suited to their habits of life, and likely to be more 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 239 

and more suitable to them until their death. And 
men must desire to have these, their dwelling-places, 
built as strongly as possible, and furnished and decora- 
ted daintily, and set in pleasant places, in bright light 
and good air, being able to choose for themselves that 
at least as well as swallows. And when the houses 
are grouped together in cities, men must have so much 
civic fellowship as to subject their architecture to a 
common law, and so much civic pride as to desire that 
the whole gathered group of human dwellings should 
be a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face of 
the earth. Not many weeks ago an English clergy, 
man, a master of this university, a man not given to 
sentiment, but of middle age, and great practical 
sense, told me, by accident, and wholly without refer^ 
ence to the subject now before us, that he never could 
enter London from his country parsonage but with 
closed eyes, lest the sight of the blocks of houses which 
the railroad intersected in the suburbs should unfit him, 
by the horror of it, for his day's work. 

123. Now, it is not possible — and I repeat to you, 
only in more deliberate assertion, what I wrote just 
twenty-two years ago in the last chapter of the 
" Seven Lamps of Architecture "—it is not possible to 
have any right morality, happiness, or art in any 
country where the cities are thus built, or thus, let me 
rather say, clotted and coagulated ; spots of a dreadful 
mildew spreading by patches and blotches over the 



^40 LECTURES ON ART. 

country they consume. You must have lovely cities, 
crystallized, not coagulated, into form ; limited in size, 
and not casting out the scum and scurf of them into an 
encircling eruption of shame, but girded each with its 
sacred pomoeriura, and with garlands of gardens full 
of blossoming trees, and softly guided streams. 

That is impossible, you say ! It may be so. I have 
nothing to do with its possibility, but only with its in- 
dispensability. More than that must be possible, how- 
ever, before you can have a school of art ; namely, 
that you find places elsewhere than in England, or at 
least in otherwise unserviceable parts of England, for 
the establishment of manufactories needing the help 
of fire, that is to say, of all the r^x^^ai /Savavdixal and 
ETtipprjToi of which it was long ago known to be the 

constant nature that ^a6xoX.ia<i ^dXidra s'xovdi Hal (piXcDv 

Hal TtolEco^ dweTttjiisXEidQai,^ and to reduce such manu- 
factures to their lowest limit, so that nothing may ever 
be made of iron that can as effectually be made of 
wood or stone ; and nothing moved by steam that can 
be as effectually moved by natural forces. And ob- 
serve, that for all mechanical effort required in social 
life and in cities, water power is infinitely more than 
enough ; for anchored mills on the large rivers, and 
mills moved by sluices from reservoirs filled by the 
tide, will give you command of any quantity of con- 
stant motive power you need. 

Agriculture by the hand, then, and absolute refusal 



RELATION OF ART TO USE. 241 

or banishment of unnecessary igneous force are the 
first conditions of a school of art in any country. And 
until you do this, be it soon or late, things will con- 
tinue in that triumphant state to which, for want of 
finer art, your mechanism has brought them ; that, 
though England is deafened with spinning wheels, her 
people have not clothes — though she is black with dig- 
ging of fuel, they die of cold — and though she has sold 
her soul for gain, they die of hunger. Stay in that 
triumph, if you choose; but be assured of this, it is 
not one which the fine arts will ever share with you. 
124. IN'ow, I have given you my message, contain- 
ing, as I know, offense enough, and itself, it may seem 
to many, unnecessary enough. But just in proportion 
to its apparent non-necessity, and to its certain offense, 
was its real need, and my real duty to speak it. The 
study of the fine arts could not be rightly associated 
with the grave work of English universities, without 
due and clear protest against the misdirection of na- 
tional energy, which for the present renders all good 
results of such study on a great scale, impossible. I 
can easily teach you, as any other moderately good 
draughtsman could, how to hold your pencils, and how 
to lay your colors ; but it is little use my doing that, 
while the nation is spending millions of money in the 
destruction of all that pencil or color have to repre- 
sent, and in the promotion of false forms of art, which 
are only the costliest and the least enjoyable of follies. 



243 LEGTURE8 ON ART. 

And therefore these are the things that I have first 
and last to tell you in this place — that the fine arts 
are not to be learned by locomotion, but by making 
the homes we live in lovely, and by staying in them — 
that the fine arts are not to be learned by competition, 
but by doing our quiet best in our own way ; that the 
fine arts not to be learned by exhibition, but by doing 
what is right, and making what is honest, whether it 
be exhibited or not ; and, for the sum of all, that 
men must paint and build neither for pride nor money, 
but for love ; for love of their art, for the love of their 
neighbor, and whatever better love may be than these, 
founded on these. I know that I gave some pain, 
which I was most unwilling to give, in speaking of the 
possible abuses of religious art ; but there can be no 
danger of any, so long as w^e remember that God in- 
habits cottages as well as churches, and ought to be 
well lodged there also. Begin with wooden floors; 
the tesselated ones will take care of themselves ; begin 
with thatching roofs, and you shall end by splendidly 
vaulting them ; begin by taking care that no old eyes 
fail over their Bibles, nor young ones over their nee- 
dles, for want of rushlight, and then you may have 
whatever true good is to be got out of colored glass or 
wax candles. And in thus putting the arts to uni- 
versal use, you will find also their universal inspiration, 
their universal benediction. I told you there was no 
evidence of a special divineness in any application of 



I 



RELATION OF ART TO USE, 243 

them ; that they were always equally human and 
equally divine ; and in closing these inaugural series 
of lectures, into which I have endeavored to compress 
I be principles that are to be the foundations of your 
future work, it is my last duty to say some positive 
words as to the divinity of all art, w^hen it is truly 
fair, or truly serviceable. 

125. Every seventh day, if not oftener, the greater 
number of well-meaning persons in England thank- 
fully receive from their teachers a benediction, couched 
in these terms : " The grace of our Lord Christ, and 
the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost 
be with you." IN'ow I do not know precisely w^hat 
sense is attached in the English public mind to those 
expressions. But what I have to tell you positively 
is, that the three things do actually exist, and can be 
known if you care to know them, and possessed if you 
care to possess them ; and that another thing exists, 
beside these, of which we already know too much. 

First, by simply obeying the orders of the founder 
of your religion, all grace, graciousness, or beauty and 
favor of gentle life, w411 be given to you in mind and 
body, in work and in rest. The grace of Christ exists, 
and can be had if you will. Secondly, as you know 
more and more of the created world, you will find 
that the true will of its Maker is that its creatures 
should be happy — that He has made everything beau- 
tiful in its time and its place, and that it is chiefly by 



244 LEGTVBES ON ART. 

the fault of men, when they are allowed the liberty of 
thwarting His laws, that creation groans or travails in 
pain. The love of God exists, and you may see it, and 
live in it if you will. Lastly, a Spirit does actually 
exist which teaches the ant her path, the bird her 
building, and men, in an instinctive and marvelous 
way, whatever lovely arts and noble deeds are possible 
to them. Without it you can do no good thing. Ta 
the grief of it you can do many bad ones. In the pos- 
session of it is your peace and your power. 

And there is a fourth thing, of which we already 
know too much. There is an evil spirit whose 
dominion is in blindness and in cowardice, as the 
dominion of the spirit of wisdom is in clear sight and 
in courage. 

And this blind and cowardly spirit is forever telling 
you that evil things are pardonable, and you shall not 
die for them, and that good things are impossible, and 
you need not live for them : and that gospel of his is 
now the loudest that is preached in your Saxon tongue. 
You will find some day, to your cost, if you believe 
the first part of it, that it is not true; but you may 
never, if you believe the second part of it, find, to 
your gain, that also, untrue ; and, therefore, I pray 
you with all earnestness to prove, and know within 
your hearts, that all things lovely and righteous are 
possible for those who believe in their possibility, and 
who determine that, for their part, they will make 



RKLATION OF ART TO USE. 245 

every day's work contribute to them. Let ever}; 
dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, 
and every setting sun be to you as its close — then let 
every one of these short lives leave its sure record of 
some kindly thing done for others — some goodly 
strength or knowledge gained for yourselves ; so, from 
day to day, and strength to strength, you shall build 
up indeed, by art, by thought, and by just will, an 
ecclesia of England, of which it shall not be said, 
"see what manner of stones are here," but "see what 
manner of men." 



246 LEUTUMES ON ART. 



LECTUEE Y. 

LINE. 

126. You will, I doubt not, willingly permit me to 
begin your lessons in real practice of art in words of 
higher authority than mine (I ought rather to say, of 
all author! t}^ while mine are of none), the words of 
the greatest of English painters : one also, than whom 
there is indeed no greater, among those of any nation, 
or any time — our own gentle Eeynolds. 

He says in his first discourse: " The Directors " (of 
the Academy) " ought more particularly to watch over 
the genius of those students, who being more ad- 
vanced, are arrived at that critical period of study, on 
the nice management of which their future turn of 
taste depends. At that age it is natural for them to 
be more captivated with what is brilliant, than with 
what is solid, and to prefer splendid negligence to 
painful and humiliating exactness. 

" A facihty in composing — a lively and what is 
called a masterly handling of the chalk or pencil, 
are, it must be confessed, captivating qualities to 
young minds, and become of course the objects of their 



I 
I 
J 



LINE. 247 

ambition. They endeavor to imitate these dazzling 
excellences, which they will find no great labor in at- 
taining. After much time spent in these frivolous 
pursuits, the difficulty will be to retreat ; but it will 
then be too late ; and there is scarce an instance of 
return to scrupulous labor, after the mind has 
been debauched and deceived by this fallacious 
mastery." 

127. I read you these words, chiefly that Sir 
Joshua; who founded, as first president, the academi- 
cal schools of English painting, in these well-known 
discourses, may also begin, as he has truest right to do, 
our system of instruction in this university. But 
secondly, I read them that I may press on your atten- 
tion these singular words, " painful and humiliating ex- 
a-ctness." Singular, as expressing the first conditions 
of the study required from his pupils by the master, 
who, of all men except Velasquez, seems to have 
painted with the greatest ease. It is true that he 
asks this pain, this humiliation, only from youths who 
intend to follow the profession of artists. But if you 
wish yourselves to know anything of the practice of 
art, you must not suppose that because 3^our study will 
be more desultory than that of academy students, it 
may therefore be less accurate. The shorter the time 
you have to give, the more careful you should be to 
spend it profitably ; and I would not wish you to de- 
vote one hour to the practice of drawing, unless you 



248 LECTURES ON ART, 

are resolved to be informed in it of all that in an hour 
can be taught. 

128. I speak of the practice of drawing only ; 
though elementary study of modeling may perhaps 
some day be advisably connected with it ; but I do not 
wish to disturb or amuse you wdth a formal statement 
of the manifold expectations I have formed respecting 
your future w^ork. You will not, I am sure, imagine 
that I have begun without a plan, nor blame my reti- 
cence as to the parts of it which cannot yet be put 
into execution, and which there may occur reason aft- 
erward to modify. My first task must unquestionably 
be to lay before you right and simple methods of 
drawing and coloring. 

I use the word " coloring " without reference to any 
particular vehicle of color, for the laws of good paint- 
ing are the same, whatever liquid is employed to dis- 
solve the pigments. But the technical management of 
oil is more difficult than that of water-color, and the 
impossibility of using it with safety among books or 
prints, and its unavailableness for note-book sketches 
and memoranda, are sufficient reasons for not intro- 
ducing it in a course of practice intended chiefly for 
students of literature. On the contrary, in the exer- 
cises of artists, oil should be the vehicle of color em- 
ployed from the first. The extended practice of water- 
color painting, as a separate skill, is in every way 
harmful to the arts : its pleasant siightness and plaus- 



LINE. 249 

ible dexterity divert the genius of the painter from its 
proper aims, and withdraw the attention of the pub- 
lic from excellence of higher claim ; nor ought any 
man, who has the consciousness of ability for good 
work, to be ignorant of, or indolent in employing, the 
methods of making its results permanent as long as 
the laws of nature allow. It is surely a severe lesson 
to us in this matter, that the best works of Turner 
could not be shown to the public for six months with- 
out being destroyed — and that his most ambitious ones 
for the most part perished, even before they could be 
shown. I will break through my law of reticence, 
however, so far as to tell you that I have hope of one 
day interesting you greatly (with the help of the 
Florentine masters) in the study of the arts of mold- 
ing and painting porcelain ; and to induce some of you 
to use your future power of patronage in encouraging 
the various branches of this art, and turning the at- 
tention of the workmen of Italy from the vulgar tricks 
of minute and perishable mosaic to the exquisite sub- 
tilties of form and color possible in the perfectly 
ductile, afterward unalterable clay. And one of the 
ultimate results of such craftsmanship might be the 
production of pictures as brilliant as painted glass — as 
delicate as the most subtle water-colors, and more 
permanent than the Pyramids. 

129. And now to begin our own work. In order 
that we may know how rightly to learu to draw, and 



250 LECTURES ON ART, 

to paint, it will be necessar\'-, will it not, that we know 
first what we are to aim at doing — what kind of rep- 
resentation of nature is best ? 

I will tell you in the words of Lionardo. " That 
is the most praiseworthy painting which has most 
conformity with the thing represented," ''^ quella jpit- 
tura ejpiu laudabile^ la quale ha piio conformita con la 
cosa imitata " (chap. 2Y6). In plain terms, " the paint- 
ing which is likest nature is the best." And you will 
find by referring to the preceeding chapter, " com£ lo 
sjpecchio e maestro d^ jpittori^^ how absolutely Lion- 
ardo means what he says. Let the living thing (he 
tells us) be reflected in a mirror, then put your picture 
beside the reflection, and match the one with the 
other. And indeed the very best painting is unques 
tionably so like the mirrored truth, that all the world 
admit its excellence. Entirely first-rate work is so 
quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it; 
you may not particularly admire it, but you will find 
no fault with it. Second-rate painting pleases one 
person much, and displeases another; but first-rate 
painting pleases all a little, and intensely pleases those 
who can recognize its unostentatious skill. 

130. This, then, is what we have first got to do — 
to make our drawing look as like the thing we have to 
draw as we can. 

Now, all objects are seen by the eye as patches of 
color of a certain shape, with gradations of color 



LINE, 251 

within them. And, unless their colors be actually 
luminous, as those of the sun, or of fire, these patches 
of different hues are sufficiently inimitable, except so 
far as they are seen stereoscopically. You will find 
Lionardo again and again insisting on the stereoscopic 
power of the double sight ; but do not let that trouble 
you ; you can only paint what you can see from one 
point of sight, but that is quite enough. So seen, then, 
all objects appear to the human eye simply as masses 
of color of variable depth, texture, and outline. The 
outline of any object is the limit of its mass, as re- 
lieved against another mass. Take a crocus, and put 
it on a green cloth. You will see it detach itself 
as a mere space of yellow from the green behind it, as 
it does from the grass. Hold it up against the win- 
dow — you will see it detach itself as a dark space 
against the white or blue behind it. In either case its 
outline is the limit of the space of color by which it 
expresses itself to your sight. That outline is there- 
fore infinitely subtle — not even a line, but the place of 
a line, and that, also, made soft by texture. In the 
finest painting, it is therefore slightly softened ; but it 
is necessary to be able to draw it with absolute sharpness 
and precision. The art of doing this is to be obtained by 
drawing it as an actual Ime, w^hich art is to be the sub- 
ject of our present inquiry ; but I must first lay the 
divisions of the entire subject completely before you. 
131. I have said that all objects detach themselves 



252 LECTURES ON ART, 

as masses of color. Usually, light and shade are 
thought of as separate from color ; but the fact is that 
all nature is seen as a mosaic composed of graduated 
portions of different colors, dark or light. There is 
no difference in the quality of these colors, except 
as affected by texture. You will constantly hear 
lights and shades spoken of as if these were different 
in nature, and to be painted in different ways. But 
every hght is a shadow compared to higher lights, till 
we reach the brightness of the sun ; and every shadow 
is a light compared to lower shadows, till we reach the 
darkness of night. 

Every color used in painting, except pure white and 
oiack, IS therefore a light and snade at the same time, 
xt IS a light with reference to ail below it, and a shade 
with reference to all above it. 

132. The solid forms of an object, that is to say, 
the projections or recessions of its surface within the 
outline, are, for the most part, rendered visible by 
variations m the intensity or quantity of light failing 
on them. The study of the relations between the 
Quantities of this light, irrespectively of its color, is 
tlie second division of the regulated science of painting. 

i33„ Finally, the qualities and relations ot natural 
colors, the means of imitating them, and the laws by 
which they become separately beautiful, and in asso- 
ciation harmonious, are the subjects of the third and 
final aivision oi the painter s study. I shall endeavor 



II 



LTNW, ^53 

at once to state to you what is most immediately de- 
sirable for you to know on each of these subjects, in 
this and the two following lectures. 

134. What we have to do, then, from beginning to 
end, is, I repeat once more, simply to draw spaces of 
their true shape, and to fill them with colors which 
shall match their colors ; quite a simple thing in the 
definition of it, not quite so easy in the doing of it. 

But it is something to get this simple definition ; 
and 1 wish you to notice that the terms of it are com- 
plete, though I do not introduce the terms " light " or 
*' shadow^" Painters who have no eye for color have 
greatly confused and falsified the practice of art by 
the theory that shadow is an absence of color. Shadow 
is, on the contrary, necessary to the full presence of 
color ; for every color is a diminished quantity or en- 
ergy of light ; and, practically, it follows, from what 
I have just told you (that every light in painting is a 
shadow to higher lights, and every shadow a light to 
lower shadows) that also every color in painting must 
be a shadow to some brighter color, and a light to 
some darker one — all the while being a positive color 
itself. And the great splendor of the Venetian school 
arises from their having seen and held from the be- 
ginning this great fact — that shadow is as much color 
as light, often much more. In Titian's fullest red the 
lights are pale rose-color, passing into white — the 
shadows warm deep crimson. In Veronese's most 



254 LECTUUKS ON ART, 

splendid orange, the lights are pale, the shadows cro 
cus color ; and so on. In nature, dark sides, if seen 
by reflected lights, are almost always fuller or warmer 
in color than the lights ; and the practice of the Bo- 
lognese and Koman schools, in drawing their shadows 
always dark and cold, is false from the beginning, and 
renders perfect painting forever impossible in those 
schools, and all that follow them. 

135. Every visible space, then, be it dark or light 
is a space of color of some kind, or of black or white. 
And you have to inclose it with a true outline, and to 
paint it with its true color. 

But before considering how we are to draw this en- 
closing line, I must state to you something about lines 
in general, and their use by different schools. I said 
just now that there was no difference between the 
masses of color of which all visible nature is composed 
except in texture. 

1. Textures are principally of three kinds : 
(I.) Lustrous, as of water and glass. 
(II.) Bloomy, or velvety, as of a rose-leaf or peach. 
(III.) Linear, produced by filaments or threads, as 
in feathers, fur, hair, and woven or reticu 
lated tissues. 

All the three sources of pleasure to the eye in text- 
ure are united in the best ornamental work. A line 



« 



LINE. 255 

picture by Fra Angelico, or a fine illuminated page of 
missal, has large spaces of gold, partly burnished and 
lustrous, partly dead ; some of it chased and en- 
riched with linear texture, and mingled with imposed 
or inlaid colors, soft in bloom like that of the rose- 
leaf. But many schools of art depend for the most 
part on one kind of texture only, and a vast quantity 
of the art of all ages rests for great part of its power 
especially on texture produced by multitudinous lines. 
Thus, wood engraving, line engraving properly so 
called, and countless varieties of sculpture, metal work 
and textile fabric, depend for great part of the effect 
of their colors, or shades, for their mystery, softness, 
and clearness, on modification of the surfaces by lines 
or threads ; and even in advanced oil painting, the work 
often depends for some part of its effect on the texture 
of the canvas. 

136. Again, the arts of etching and mezzotint en- 
graving depend principally for their effect on the vel- 
vety, or bloomy texture of their darkness^ and the 
best of all painting is the fresco work of great color- 
ists, in which the colors are what is usually called 
dead ; but they are anything but dead, they glow with 
the luminous bloom of life. The frescoes of Correg- 
gio, when not repainted, are supreme in this quality ; 
and you have a lovely example in the university 
galleries, in the untouched portion of the female 
head by Eaphael, partly restored by Lawrence. 



256 LBGTtlRES ON ART. 

137. While, however, in all periods of art these dif- 
ferent textures are thus used in various styles, and for 
various purposes, you will find that there is a broad 
historical division of schools, which will materially as- 
sist you in understanding them. The earliest art in 
most countries is linear, consisting of interwoven 
or richl}^ spiral and otherwise involved arrangements 
of sculptured or painted lines, on stone, wood, metal, 
or clay. It is generally characteristic of savage life, 
and of feverish energy of imagination. I shall exam- 
ine these schools with you hereafter^ under the gen- 
eral head of the " Schools of line." 

Secondly, even in the earliest periods, among pow- 
erful nations, this linear decoration is more or less 
filled with checkered or barred shade, and begins at 
once to represent animal or floral form, first in mere 
outline, and then by outlines filled with flat shadow, 
or with flat color. And here we instantly find two 
great divisions of temper and thought. The Greeks 
look upon all color first as light ; they are, as com- 
pared with other races, insensitive to hue, exquisitely 
sensitive to phenomena of light. And their linear 
school passes into one of flat masses of light and dark- 
ness, represented in the main by four tints— white, 
black, and two reds, one brick color, more or less 
vivid, the other dark purple ; these two representing 
their favorite Ttopcpvpso^ color, in its light and dark 
powers. On the other hand, many of the northern 



I 



LINE. 257 

nations are at first entirely insensible to light and 
shade, but exquisitely sensitive to color, and their 
linear decoration is filled with flat tints, infinitely 
varied, having no expression of light and shade. Both 
these schools have a limited but absolute perfection of 
their own, and their peculiar successes can in no wise 
be imitated, except by the strictest observance of the 
same limitations. 

138. You have then, line for the earliest art, 
branching into : 

(1.) Greek, Line with Light. 
(2.) Gothic, Line with Color. 

Now, as art completes itself, each of these schools 
retain their separate characters, but they cease to de- 
pend on lines, and learn to represent masses instead, 
becoming more refined afc the same time in all modes 
of perception and execution. 

And thus there arise the two vast mediaeval schools ; 
one of flat and infinitely varied color, with exquisite 
character and sentiment added, in the forms repre- 
sented ; but little perception of shadow. The other, 
of light and shade, with exquisite drawing of solid 
form, and little perception of color ; sometimes as 
little of sentiment. Of these, the school of flat color 
is the more vital one ; it is always natural and simple, 
if not great — and when it is great, it is very great. 



258 LECTURES ON ART, 

The school of light and shade associates itself with 
that of engraving; it is essentially an academical 
school ; broadly dividing light from darkness, and be- 
gins by assuming that the light side of all objects 
shall be represented by white, and the extreme shadow 
by black. On this conventional principle it reaches a 
limited excellence of its own, in which the best exist- 
ing types of engraving are executed, and ultimately, 
the most regular expressions of organic form in 
painting. 

Then, lastly — the schools of color advance steadily 
till they adopt from those of light and shade, what- 
ever is compatible with their own power — and then you 
have perfect art, represented centrally by that of the 
great Venetians. 

The schools of light and shade, on the other hand, 
are partly, in their academical formulas, too haughty, 
and partly in their narrowness of imagination, too 
weak, to learn much from the schools of color ; and 
they pass into a decadence, consisting partly in proud 
endeavors to give painting the qualities of sculpture, 
and partly in the pursuit of effects of light and shade, 
carried at last to extreme sensational subtlety by the 
Dutch school. In their fall, they drag the schools of 
color down with them ; and the recent history of art 
is one of confused effort to find lost roads, and resume 
allegiance to violated principles. 



M 



LINE. 251) 

189. That, briefly, is the map of the great schools, 
easily remembered by this form : 

Line. 

Early schools. 

Line and Light. Line and Color. 

Greek clay. Gothic glass. 

Mass and Light. Mass and Color. 

(Eepresented by Lionardo, (Represented by Giorgione, 

and his schools.) and his schools.) 

Mass, Light, and Color. 
(Represented by Titian, and his schools.) 

I will endeavor hereafter to show you the various 
relations of all these branches ; at present, I am only 
concerned with your own practice. My wish is that 
you should with your own eyes and fingers trace, and 
in your own progress follow, the method of advance 
traced for you by these great schools. I wish you to 
begin by getting command of line, that is to say, by 
learning to draw a steady line, limiting with absolute 
correctness the form or space you intend it to limit ; to 
proceed by gettingcommand over flat tints, so that you 
may be able to fill the spaces you have enclosed, 
evenly, either with shade or color ; according to the 
school you adopt ; and finally to obtain the power of 
adding such fineness of drawing within the masses, as 



260 LEGTTTRES ON ART, 

shall express their undulation, and their characters of 
form and texture. 

140. Those who are familiar with the methods of 
existing schools must be aware that I thus nearly in^ 
vert their practice of teaching. Students at present 
learn to draw details first, and to color and mass them 
afterward. I shall endeavor to teach you to arrange 
broad masses and colors first ; and you shall put the 
details into them afterward. I have several reasons 
for this audacity, of which you may justly require me 
to state the principal ones. The first is that, as I have 
shown you, this method I wish you to follow, is the 
natural one. All great artist-nations have actually 
learned to work in this way, and I believe it therefore 
the right, as the hitherto successful one. Secondly, 
you will find it less irksome than the reverse method, 
and more definite. When a beginner is set at once to 
draw details, and make finished studies in light and 
shade, no master can correct his innumerable errors, 
or rescue him out of his endless difficulties. But in 
the natural method, he can correct, if he will, his own 
errors. You will have positive lines to draw, present- 
ing no more difficulty, except in requiring greater 
steadiness of hand than the outlines of a map. They 
will be generally sweeping and simple, instead of be- 
ing jagged into promontories and bays ; but assuredly, 
they may be drawn rightly (with patience), and their 
riffhtness tested with mathematical accuracv. You 



il 



LINE. 2(S1 

have only to follow your own line with tracing paper, 
and apply it to your copy. If they do not correspond, 
you are wrong, and you need no master to show you 
where. Again ; in washing in a flat tone of color or 
shade, 3^ou can always see yourself if it is flat, and 
kept well within the edges ; and you can set a piece 
of your color side by side with that of the copy ; if it 
does not match, you are wrong ; and, again, you need 
no one to tell you so, if your eye for color is true. It 
happens, indeed, more frequently than would be 
supposed, that there is real want of power in the eye 
to distinguish colors ; and this I even suspect to be a 
condition which has been sometimes attendant on high 
degrees of cerebral sensitiveness in other directions : 
but such want of faculty would be detected in your 
first two or three exercises by this simple method, while 
otherwise you might go on for years endeavoring 
to color from nature in vain. Lastly, and this 
is a very weighty collateral reason, such a 
method enables me to show you many things, 
besides the art of drawing. Every exercise that 
I prepare for you will be either a portion of some 
important example of ancient art, or of some natural 
object. However rudely or unsucessfully you ma}^ 
draw it (though I anticipate from you neither want of 
care nor success), you will nevertheless have learned 
what no words could have as forcibly or completely 
taught you, either respecting early art or organic 



262 LECTURES ON ART. 

structure ; and I am thus certain that not a moment 
you spend attentively will be altogether wasted, and 
that, generally, you will be twice gainers by every ef- 
fort. There is, however, yet another point in which I 
think a change of existing methods will be advisable. 

14:1. You have here in Oxford one of the finest col- 
lections in Europe of drawings in pen, and chalk, by 
Michael Angelo and Kaphael. Of the whole number, 
you cannot but have noticed that not one is weak or 
student-like — all are evidently master's work. 

You may look the galleries of Europe through, and 
BO far as I know, or as it is possible to make ^vith 
safety any so wide generalization, you will not find in 
them a childish or feeble drawing, by these, or by any 
other great master. 

And farther — by the greatest men — by Titian, 
Yelasquez, or Yeronese — you will hardly find an au- 
thentic drawing at all. For, the fact is, that while we 
moderns have always learned, or tried to learn, to 
paint by drawing, the ancients learned to draw by 
painting — or by engraving, more difficult still. The 
brush was put into their hands when they were children, 
and they were forced to draw with that, until, if they 
used the pen or crayon, they used it either with the 
lightness of a brush or the decision of a graver. Mi- 
chael Angelo uses his pen like a chisel ; but all of them 
seem to use it only when they are in the height of 
their power, and then for rapid notation of thought or 



J 



LINE. 263 

for study of models ; but never as a practice helping 
them to paint. Probably exercises of the severest 
kind were gone through in minute drawing by the ap- 
prentices of the goldsmiths, of which we hear and 
know little, and which were entirely a matter of 
course. To these, and to the exquisiteness of care and 
touch developed in working precious metals, may 
probably be attributed the final triumph of Italian 
sculpture. Michael Angelo, wHen a boy, is said to 
have copied engravings by Schongauer and others 
with his pen, in fac-simile so true that he could pass 
his drawings as the originals. But I should only dis- 
courage you from all farther attempts in art, if I asked 
you to imitate any of these accomplished drawings of 
the gem-artificers. You have, fortunately, a most in- 
teresting collection of them already in your galleries, 
and may try your hands on them if you will. But I 
desire rather that you should attempt nothing except 
what can by determination be absolutely accomplished, 
and be known and felt by you to be accomplished 
when it is so. iN'ow. therefore, I am going at once to 
comply with that popular instinct which, I hope, so 
far as you care for drawing at. all, you are still boys 
enough to feel, the desire to paint. Paint you shall ; 
but remember, I understand by painting what you 
will not find easy. Paint you shall; but daub or blot 
you shall not : and there Avill be even more care re- 
quired, though care of a pleasanter kind, to follow the 



364 LEGTVRES ON ART, 

lines traced for you with the point of the brush than 
if they had been drawn with that of a crayon. But 
from the very beginning (though carrying on at the 
same time an incidental practice with crayon and 
lead pencil), you shall try to draw a line of absolute 
correctness with the point, not of pen or crayon, but 
of the brush, as Apelles did, and as all colored lines 
are drawn on Greek vases. A line of absolute cor- 
rectness, observe. I do not care how slowly you do it, 
or with how many alterations, junctions, or retouch- 
ings ; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall 
be right, and right by measurement, to the same mi- 
nuteness which you would have to give in a govern- 
ment chart to the map of a dangerous shoal. 

142. This question of measurement is, as you are 
probably aware, one much vexed in art schools ; but 
it is determined indisputably by the very first words 
written by Lionardo : " 11 giovane deve jprima imjpa- 
rare ^rospettiva, ^er le misiore d? ogni cosaP 

Without absolute precision of measurement, it is 
certainly impossible for you to learn perspective 
rightly ; and, as far as I can judge, impossible to learn 
anything else rightly. And in my past experience of 
teaching, I have found that such precision is of all things 
the most difficult to inforce on the pupils. It is easy to 
persuade to dihgence, or provoke to enthusiasm ; but I 
have found it hitherto impossible to humiliate one 
student iuto pert^ct accuracy. 



I 



LINE. 265 

It is, therefore, necessary, in beginning a system of 
drawing for the university, that no opening should be 
left for failure in this essential matter. I hope you 
will trust the words of the most accomplished draughts- 
man of Italy, and the painter of the great sacred pict- 
ure which, perhaps beyond all others, has influenced 
the mind of Europe, when he tells you that your first 
duty is " to learn perspective by the measures of every- 
thing." For perspective, I will undertake that it shall 
be made, practically, quite easy to you ; but I wish 
first to make application to the trustees of the I^ational 
Gallery for the loan to Oxford of Turner's perspective 
diagrams, which are at present lying useless in a folio 
m the National Gallerj^ ; and therefore we will not 
trouble ourselves about perspective till the autumn ; 
unless, in the meanwhile, you care to master the math- 
ematical theory of it, which I have carried as far as is 
necessary tor you in my treatise written in 1859, of 
which copies shall be placed at 3^our disposal in your 
working room. But the habit and dexterity of meas- 
urement you must acquire at once, and that with en- 
gineer's accuracy. I hope that in our now gradually 
developing system of education, elemetary architect- 
ural or military drawing will be required at all public 
schools ; so that when youths come to the university, 
it may be no more necessary for them to pass through 
the preliminary exercises of drawing than of gram- 
mar. For the present, I will place in your series 



266 LECTURES ON ART, 

examples simple and severe enough for all necessary 
practice. 

143. And while you are learning to measure, and 
to draw, and lay flat tints, with the brush, you must 
also get easy command of the pen ; for that is not only 
the great instrument for the finest sketching, but its 
right use is the foundation of the art of illumination. 
In nothing is fine art more directly connected with 
service than in the close dependence of decorative il- 
lumination on good writing. Perfect illumination is 
only writing made lovely ; the moment it passes into 
picture-making it has lost its dignity and function. 
For pictures, small or great, if beautiful, ought not to 
be painted on leaves of books, to be worn with service; 
and pictures, small or great, not beautiful, should be 
painted nowhere. But to make writing itself beauti- 
ful — to make the sweep of the pen lovely — is the true 
art of illumination ; and I particularly wish you to note 
this, because it happens continually that young girls 
who are incapable of tracing a single curve with stead- 
iness, much more of delineating any ornamental or or- 
ganic form with correctness, think that the work 
which would be intolerable in ordinary drawing be- 
comes tolerable when it is employed for the decoration 
of texts ; and thus they render all healthy progress im- 
possible, by protecting themselves in inefficiency un- 
der the shield of a good motive. Whereas the right 
way of setting to work is to make themselves first 



I 



LINE. 267 

mistresses of the art of writing beautifully ; and then to 
apply that art in its proper degrees of development to 
whatever they desire permanently to write. And it is 
indeed a much more truly religious duty for girls to 
acquire a habit of deliberate legible, and lovely penman- 
ship in their daily use of the pen, than to illuminate 
any quantity of texts. Having done so, they may next 
discipline their hands into the control of lines of any 
length, and, finally, add the beauty of color and form 
to the flowing of these perfect lines. But it is only 
after years of practice that they will be able to illum- 
inate noble words rightly for the eyes, as it is only 
after years of practice that they can make them melo- 
dious rightly, with the voice. 

144. I shall not attempt, in this lecture, to give you 
any account of the use of the pen as a drawing instru- 
ment. That use is connected in many ways with 
principles both of shading and of engraving, hereafter 
to be examined at length. But T may generally state to 
you that its best employment is in giving determi- 
nation to the forms in drawings washed with neutral 
tint ; and that, in this use of it, Holbein is quite with- 
out a rival. I have therefore placed many examples 
of his work among your copies. It is employed for 
rapid study by Raphael and other masters of delinea- 
tion, who, in such cases, give with it also, partial in- 
dications of shadow ; but it is not a proper instrument 
for shading, when drawings are intended to be deliL>-. 



268 LECTURES ON ART. 

erate and complete, nor do the great masters ever so 
employ it. Its virtue is the power of producing a per- 
fectly delicate, equal, and decisive line with great rap- 
idity ; and the temptation allied with that virtue is to 
licentious haste, and chance-swept instead of strictly- 
commanded curvature. In the hands of very great 
painters it obtains, like the etching needle, qualities of 
exquisite charm in this free use ; but all attempts at 
imitation of these confused and suggestive sketches 
must be absolutely denied to yourselves while students. 
You may fancy you have produced something like 
them with little trouble ; but, be assured, it is in reality 
as unlike them as nonsense is unlike sense ; and that, 
if you persist in such work, you will not only prevent 
your own executive progress, but you will never un- 
derstand in all your lives what good painting means. 
Whenever you take a pen in your hand, if you cannot 
count every line you lay with it, and say why you 
make it so long and no longer, and why you drew it 
in that direction and no other, your work is bad. The 
only man who can put his pen to full speed, and yet 
retain command over every separate line of it, is Diirer. 
He has done this in the illustrations of a missal pre- 
served at Munich, which have been fairly fac-similed ; 
and of these I have placed several in your copying 
series, with some of Turner's landscape etchings and 
other examples of deliberate pen work, such as will 
advantage you in early study. The proper use of them 
you will find explained in the catalogue. 



J 



LINE. 269 

145. And, now, but one word more to-day. Do 
not impute to me the impertinence of setting before 
you what is new in this system of practice as being 
certainly the best method. No English artists are yet 
agreed entirely on early methods ; and even Reynolds 
expresses with some hesitation his conviction of the 
expediency of learning to draw with the brush. But 
this method that I show you rests in all essential 
points on his authority, on Lionardo's, or on the evi- 
dent as well as recorded practice of the most splendid 
Greek and Italian draughtsmen ; and you may be as- 
sured it will lead you, however slowly, to a great and 
certain skill. To what degree of skill, must depend 
greatly on yourselves ; but I know that in practice of 
this kind you cannot spend an hour without definitely 
gaining, both in true knowledge of art, and in useful 
power of hand ; and for what may appear in it too 
diflScult, I must shelter or support myself, as in begin- 
ning, so in closing, this first lecture on practice, by the 
words of Reynolds: "The impetuosity of youth is 
disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, 
and desires from mere impatience of labor to take the 
citadel by storm. They must, therefore, be told again 
and again that labor is the only price of solid fame, 
and that, whatever their force of genius may be, there 
is no easy method of becoming a good painter." 



270 LECTURES ON ART, 



LECTUEE YL 

LIGHT. 

146. The plan of the divisions of art schools which 
I gave you in the last lecture is, of course, only a first 
germ of classification, on which we are to found far- 
ther and more defined statement ; but for this very 
reason it is necessary that every term of it should be 
very clear in your minds. 

And especially I must ask you to note the sense in 
which I use the word " mass." Artists usually employ 
that word to express the spaces of light and darkness, 
or of color, into which a picture is divided. But this 
habit of theirs arises partly from their always speak- 
ing of pictures in which the lights represent solid 
form. If they had instead been speaking of flat tints, 
as, for instance, of the gold and blue in this missal 
page (S. 7), they would not have called them "masses," 
but "spaces" of color. Now both for accuracy and 
convenience sake, you will find it well to observe this 
distinction, and to call a simple flat tint a space of 
color ; and only the representation of solid or project- 
ing form a mass. 



I 



LIGHT. 271 

At all events, I mean myself always to make this 
distinction ; which I think you will see the use of by 
comparing the missal page (S. 7) with a piece of fin- 
ished painting (Edu. 2). The one I call space with 
color; the other, mass with color; I use, however, 
the word "line" rather than "space" in our general 
scheme, because you cannot limit a flat tint but by a 
line, or the locus of a line ; whereas a gradated tint, 
expressive of mass, may be lost at its edges in another 
without any fixed limit ; and practically is so, in the 
works of the greatest masters. 

147. You have thus, in your hexagonal scheme, the 
expression of the universal manner of advance in 
painting. Line first ; then line enclosing flat spaces 
colored or shaded ; then the lines vanish, and the solid 
forms are seen within the spaces. That is the univer- 
sal law of advance — 1, line ; 2, flat space ; 3, massed 
or solid space. But, as you see, this advance may be 
made, and has been made, by two different roads ; one 
advancing always through color, the other through 
light and shade. And these two roads are taken by 
two entirely different kinds of men. The way by color 
is taken by men of cheerful, natural and entirely sane 
disposition in body and mind, much resembling, even 
at its strongest, the temper of well brought up chil- 
dren—too happy to think deeply, yet with powers of 
imagination by which they can live other lives than 
their actual ones ; make-believe lives, while yet they 



272 LECTURES ON ART. 

remain conscious all the while that they are making 
believe — therefore entirely sane. They are also abso- 
lutely contented; they ask for no more light than is 
immediately around them, and cannot see anything 
like darkness, but only green and blue, in the earth 
and sea. 

148. The way by light and shade is, on the con- 
trary, taken by men of the highest powers of thought 
and most earnest desire for truth ; they long for light, 
and for knowledge of all that light can show. But 
seeking for light, they perceive also darkness ; seeking 
for truth and substance, they find vanity. They look 
for form in the earth — for dawn in the sky ; and seek- 
ing these, they find formlessness in the earth, and 
night in the sky. 

Now remember, in these introductory lectures I am 
putting before you the roots of things, which are 
strange, and dark, and often, it may seem, unconnected 
with the branches. You may not at present think 
these metaphysical statements necessary ; but as you 
go on, you will find that having hold of the clue to 
methods of work through their springs in human char- 
acter, you may perceive unerringly where they lead, and 
what constitutes their wrongness and rightness ; and 
when we have the main prmciples laid down, all 
others will develop themselves in due succession, and 
everything will become more clearly intelligible to you 
in the end, for having been apparently vague in the 



LIGHT. 273 

beginning. You know when one is laying the foun- 
dation of a house, it does not show directly where the 
rooms are to be. 

149. You have then these two great divisions of 
human mind : one, content with the colors of things, 
whether they are dark or light ; the other seeking 
light pure, as such, and dreading darkness as such. 
One, also, content with the colored aspects and vision- 
ary shapes of things ; the other seeking their form and 
substance. And, as I said, the school of knowledge, 
seeking light, perceives, and has to accept and deal 
with obscurity ; and seeking form, it has to accept and 
deal with formlessness, or death. 

Farther, the school of color in Europe, using the 
word Gothic in its broadest sense, is essentially Gothic- 
Christian ; and full of comfort and peace. Again, the 
school of light is essentially Greek, and full of sorrow. 
I cannot tell you which is right, or least wrong. I tell 
you only what I know — this vital distinction between 
them ; the Gothic or color school is always cheerful, 
the Greek always oppressed by the shadow of death ; 
and the stronger its masters are, the closer that body 
of death grips them. The strongest whose work I can 
show you in recent periods is Holbein ; next to him is 
Lionardo; and then DUrer: but of the three Hol- 
bein is the strongest, and with his help I will put the 
two schools in their full character before you in a mo - 
ment. 



274 LECTURES ON ART, 

150. Here is, first, an entirely characteristic piece 
of the great color school. It is by Cima of Coneg- 
liano, a mountaineer, like Luini, born under the Alps of 
Friuli. His Christian name was John Baptist : he is 
here painting his name-Saint ; the whole picture full 
of peace and intense faith and hope, and deep joy in 
light of sky, and fruit and flower and weed of earth. 
The picture was painted for the church of Our Lady 
of the Garden at Venice, La Madonna dell' Orto (pro- 
perly Madonna of the Kitchen Garden), and it is 
full of simple flowers, and has the wild straw- 
berry of Cima's native mountains gleaming through 
the grass. 

Beside it I will put a piece of strongest work of the 
school of light and shade — strongest, because Holbein 
was a colorist also ; but he belongs, nevertheless, es- 
sentially to the chiaroscuro school. You know that 
his name is connected, in ideal work, chiefly with his 
" Dance of Death." I will not show you any of the 
terror of that ; only his deepest thought of death, his 
well-known " Dead Christ." It will at once show you 
how completely the Christian art of this school is op- 
pressed by its veracity, and forced to see what is fear- 
ful, even in what it most trusts. You may think I am 
showing you contrasts merely to fit my theories. But 
there is Diirer's "Knight and Death," his greatest 
plate ; and if I had Lionardo's " Medusa " here, which 
he painted when only a boy, you would have seen how 



LtOHT, 275 

he was held by the same chain. And you cannot but 
wonder why, this being the melancholy temper of the 
great Greek or naturalistic school^ I should have called 
it the school of light. I call it so because it is through 
its intense love of light that the darkness becomes ap- 
parent to it, and through its intense love of truth and 
form that all mystery becomes attractive to it. And 
when, having learned these things, it is joined to the 
school of color, you have the perfect, though always, 
as I will show you, pensive, art of Titian and his foL 
lowers. 

151. But remember, its first development, and all 
its final power, depends on Greek sorrow, and Greek 
religion. 

The school of light is founded in the Doric worship 
of Apollo and the Ionic worship of Athena, as the 
spirits of life in the light, and of life in the air, op- 
posed each to their own contrary deity of death — Apollo 
to the Python, Athena to the Gorgon — Apollo as life 
in light, to the earth spirit of corruption in darkness, 
Athena as life by motion, to the Gorgon spirit of 
death by pause, freezing, or turning to stone : both of 
the great divinities taking their glory from the evil 
they have conquered ; both of them, when angry, tak- 
ing to men the form of the evil which is their opposite 
— Apollo slaying by poisoned arrow, by pestilence ; 
Athena by cold, the black aegis on her breast. These 
are the definite and direct expressions of th^ GreeU 



276 LECTURES ON ART, 

thoughts respecting death and life. But underlying 
both these, and far more mysterious, dreadful, and yet 
beautiful, there is the Greek conception of spiritual 
darkness; of the anger of fate, whether foredoomed 
or avenging ; the root and theme of all Greek trag- 
edy ; the anger of the Erinnyes, and Demeter Erinnys, 
compared to which the anger of either of Apollo or 
Athena is temporary and partial — and also, while 
Apollo or Athena only slay, the power of Demeter 
and the Eumenides is over the whole life ; so that in the 
stories of Bellerophon, of Hippolytus, of Orestes, of 
(Edipus, you have an incomparably deeper shadow 
than any that was possible to the thought of later 
ages, when the hope of the resurrection had become 
definite. And if you keep this in mind, you will find 
every name and legend of the oldest history become 
full of meaning to you. All the mythic accounts of 
Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of 
Tantalus. The main one is the making of the ivory 
shoulder of Pelops after Demeter has eaten the shoul- 
der of flesh. With that you have Broteas, the brother 
of Pelops, carving the first statue of the mother of 
the gods ; and you have his sister, Niobe, weeping her- 
self to stone under the anger of the deities of light. 
Then Pelops himself, the dark-faced, gives name to 
the Peloponnesus, which you may therefore read as 
the " isle of darkness ;" but its central city, Sparta, the 
" sown city," is connected with all the ideas of the 



LIGHT, 277 

earth as life-giving. And from her you have Helen, 
the representative of light in beauty, and the Fratres 
Helenas — " hicida sidera ; " and, on the other side of 
the hills, the brightness of Argos, with its correlative 
darkness over the Atreidae, marked to you by Helios 
turning away his face from the feast of Thyestes. 

162. Then join with these the northern legends 
connected with the air. It does not matter whether 
you take Dorus as the son of Apollo or the son of 
Hellen ; he equally symbolizes the power of light : 
while his brother, ^olus, through all his descendants, 
chiefly in Sisyphus,^ is confused or associated with the 
real god of the winds, and represents to you the power 
of the air. And then, as this conception enters into 
art, you have the myths of Daedalus, the flight of Ica- 
rus, and the story of Phrixus and Helle, giving you 
continual associations of the physical air and light, 
ending in the power of Athena over Corinth as well 
as over Athens. E'ow, once having the clue, you can 
work out the sequels for yourselves better than I can 
for you ; and you will soon find even the earliest or 
slightest grotesques of Greek art become full of inter- 
est to you. For nothing is more wonderful than the 
depth of meaning which nations in their first days of 
thought, like children, can attach to the rudest sym- 
bols ; and vrhat to us is grotesque or ugly, like a little 
child's doll, can speak to them the loveliest things. I 
have brought you to-day a few more examples of 



278 LECTURES ON ART, 

early Greek vase painting, respecting which remember 
generally that its finest development is for the most 
part sepulchral. You have, in the first period, always 
energy in the figures, light in the sky or upon the 
figures ; * in the second period, while the conception 
of the divine power remains the same, it is thought of 
as in repose, and the light is in the god, not in the 
sky ; in the time of decline, the divine power is grad- 
ually disbelieved, and all form and light are lost to- 
gether. With that period I wish you to have nothing 
to do. You shall not have a single example of it set 
before you, but shall rather learn to recognize after- 
ward what is base by its strangeness. These, w^hich 
are to come early in the third group of your standard 
series, will enough represent to you the elements of 
early and late conception in the Greek mind of the 
deities of light. 

153. First (S. 204), you have Apollo ascending from 
the sea ; thought of as the physical sunrise; only a 
circle of light for his head ; his chariot horses, seen 
foreshortened, black against the daybreak, their feet 
not yet risen above the horizon. Underneath is the 
painting from the opposite side of the same vase ; 
Athena as the morning breeze, and Hermes as the 
morning cloud, flying across the waves before the sun- 
rise. At the distance I now hold them from you, it is 
scarcely possible for you to see that they are figures at 

* See note in the catalogue on No. 201. 



LIGHT. 279 

all, so like are they to broken fragments of flying 
mist ; and when you look close, you will see that as 
Apollo's face is invisible in the circle of light. Mer- 
cury's is invisible in the broken form of cloud ; but I 
can tell you that it is conceived as reverted, looking 
back to Athena ; the grotesque appearance of feature 
in the front is the outline of his hair. 

These two paintings are excessively rude, and of the 
archaic period ; the deities being yet thought of chiefly 
as physical powers in violent agency. 

Underneath these two are Athena and Hermes, in 
the types attained about the time of Phidias ; but, of 
course, rudely drawn on the vase, and still more 
rudely in this print from Le Normant and De Witt. 
For it is impossible (as you will soon And if you try 
for yourself) to give on a plane surface the grace of 
figures drawn on one of solid curvature, and adapted 
to all its curves ; and among other minor differences, 
Athena's lance is in the original nearly twice as tall as 
herself, and has to be cut short to come into the print 
at all. Still, there is enough here to show you what 
I want you to see — the repose, and entirely realized 
personality, of the deities as conceived in the Phidian 
period. The relation of the two deities is, I believe, 
the same as in the painting above, though probably 
there is another added of more definite kind. But the 
physical meaning still remains — Athena unhelmeted, 
as the gentle morning wind, commanding the cloud 



280 LEGTVRES ON ART. 

Hermes to slow flight. His petasus is slnng at his 
back, meaning that the clouds are not yet opened or 
expanded in the sky. 

154. I^ext (S. 205), you have Athena, again un- 
helmeted and crowned with leaves, walking between 
two nymphs, who are crowned also with leaves; and 
all the three hold flowers in their hands, and there is 
a fawn walking at Athena's feet. 

This is still Athena as the morning air, but upon the 
earth instead of in the sky, with the nymphs of the 
dew beside her; the flowers and leaves opening as 
they breathe upon them. Kote the white gleam of 
light on the fawn's breast ; and compare it with the 
next following examples (underneath this one is the 
contest of Athena and Poseidon, which does not bear 
on our present subject). 

Next (S. 206), Artemis as the moon of morning, 
walking low on the hills, and singing to her lyre ; the 
fawn beside her, with the gleam of light of sunrise on 
its ear and breast. Those of you who are often out in 
the dawn-time know that there is no moon so glorious 
as that gleaming crescent ascending before the sun, 
though in its wane. 

Underneath, Artemis and Apollo, of Phidian 
time. 

Next (S. 207), Apollo walking on the earth, god of 
the morning, singing to his lyre ; the fawn beside him, 
again with the gleam of light on its breast. And un- 



LIGHT. 281 

derneath, Apollo, crossing the sea to Delphi, of the 
Phidian time. 

155. Now you cannot but be struck in these three 
examples with the similarity of action in Athena, 
Apollo, and Artemis, drawn as deities of the morning; 
and with the association in every case of the fawn with 
them. It has been said (I will not interrupt you with 
authorities) that the fawn belongs to Apollo and Diana 
because stags are sensitive to music (are they ?). But 
you see the fawn is here with Athena of the dew, 
/though she has no lyre; and I have myself no doubt 
that in this particular relation to the gods of morning 
it always stands as the symbol of wavering and glanc- 
ing motion on the ground, as well as of the light and 
shadows through the leaves, checkering the ground as 
the fawn is dappled. Similarly the spots on the neb- 
ris of Dionysus, thought of sometimes as stars {and rrji 
T(£v adrpco TtoimXias, Diodorus, II. 1) as Well as those of 
his panthers, and the cloudings of the tortoise-shell of 
Hermes, are all significent of this light of the sky 
broken by cloud shadow. 

156. You observe also that in all the three exam- 
ples the fawn has light on its ears, and face, as well as 
its breast. In the earliest Greek drawings of animals, 
bars of white are used as one means of detaching the 
figures from the ground ; ordinarily on the under side 
of them, marking the lighter color of the hair in wild 
animals. But the placing of this bar of white, or the 



282 LECTURES ON ART. 

direction of the face in deities of light (the faces and 
flesh of women being always represented as white) may 
become expressive of the direction of the light, when 
that direction is important. Thus we are enabled at 
once to read the intention of this Greek symbol of the 
course of a day (in the center-piece of S. 208, which 
gives you the types of Hermes). At the top you have 
an archaic representation of Hermes stealing lo from 
Argus. Argus is here the night ; his grotesque feat- 
ures monstrous ; his hair overshadowing his shoulders; 
Hermes on tiptoe, stealing upon him, and taking the 
cord which is fastened to the horn of lo out of his 
hand without his feeling it. Then, underneath, you 
have the course of an entire day. Apollo first, on the 
left, dark, entering his chariot, the sun not yet risen. 
In front of him Artemis, as the moon, ascending be- 
fore him, playing on her lyre, and looking back to the 
sun. In the center, behind the horses, Hermes, as 
the cumulus cloud at mid-day, wearing his petasus 
heightened to a cone, and holding a flower in his right 
hand ; indicating the nourishment of the flowers by 
the rain from the heat-cloud. Finally, on the right, 
Latona, going down as the evening, lighted from the 
right by the sun, now sunk ; and with her feet re- 
verted, signifying the unwillingness of the departing 
day. 

Finally, underneath, you have Hermes of the Phi- 
dian period, as the floating cumulus cloud, almost 



LIQHT. 283 

shapeless (as you see him at this distance) ; with the 
tortoise-shell lyre in his hand, barred with black, and a 
fleece of white cloud, not level, but oblique^ under his 
feet. (Compare the '^id r^v Hoaoov—TtXciyiai,^ and the 
relations of the 'aiyi^oi yvioxoi ^ABdva,^ with the clouds 
as the moon's messengers, in Aristophanes ; and note 
of Hermes generall}^, that you never find him flying as 
a Victory flies, but always, if moving fast at all, 
clambering along, as it were, as a cloud gathers and 
heaps itself: the Gorgons stretch and stride in their 
flight, half kneehng, for the same reason, running or 
gliding shapelessly along in this stealthy way.) 

157. And now take this last illustration, of a very 
different kind. Here is an effect of morning light by 
Turner (S. 301), on the rocks of Otley-hill, near Leeds, 
drawn long ago, when Apollo, and Artemis, and 
Athena, still sometimes were seen, and felt, even near 
Leeds. The original drawing is one of the great 
Farnley series, and entirely beautiful. I have shown, 
in the last volume of "Modern Painters,'' how well 
Turner knew the meaning of Greek legends : he was 
not thinking of them, however, when he made this de- 
sign : but, unintentionally, has given us the very effect 
of morning light we want : the glittering of the sun- 
shine on dewy grass, half dark ; and the narrow 
gleam of it on the sides and head of the stag and 
hind. 

158. These few instances will be enough to show 



284 LECTURES ON ART, 

you how we may read in early art of the Greeks their 
strong impressions of the power of light. You will 
find the subject entered into at somewhat greater 
length in my " Queen of the Air ; " and if you will 
look at the beginning of the 7th book of Plato's 
" Polity," and read carefully the passages in the con- 
text respecting the sun and intellectual sight, you will 
see how intimately this physical love of light was con- 
nected with their philosophy, in its search, as blind 
and captive, for better knowledge. I shall not at- 
tempt to define for you to-day, the more complex but 
much shallower forms which this love of light, and 
the philosophy that accompanies it, take in the medi- 
aeval mind ; only remember that in future, when I 
briefly speak of the Greek school of art with reference 
to questions of delineation, I mean the entire range 
of the schools, from Homer's days to our own, which 
concern themselves with the representation of light, 
and the effects it produces on material form — begin- 
ning practically for us with these Greek vase paint- 
ings, and closing practically for us with Turner's sun- 
set on the Temeraire ; being throughout a school of 
captivity and sadness, but of intense power ; and which 
in its technical method of shadow on material form, as 
well as in its essential temper, is centrally represented 
to you by Durer's two great engravings of the '^Mel- 
encolia" and the "Knight and Death." On the other 
hand, when I briefly speak to you of the Gothic school, 



1 



LIOHT. ^85 

with reference to delineation, I mean the entire and 
much more extensive range of schools extending from 
the earliest art in Central Asia and Egypt down to our 
own day in India and China — schools which have been 
content to obtain beautiful harmonies of color without 
any representation of light ; and which have, many of 
them, rested in such imperfect expressions of form as 
could be so obtained ; schools usually in some measure 
childish, or restricted in intellect, and similarly child- 
ish or restricted in their philosophies or faiths ; but 
contented in the restriction ; and in the more powerful 
races, capable of advance to nobler development than 
the Greek schools, though the consummate art . of 
Europe has only been accomplished by the union of 
both. How that union was affected, I will endeavor 
to show you in my next lecture ; to-day I shall take 
note only of the points bearing on our immediate 
practice. 

159. A certain number of you, by faculty and nat 
ural disposition — and all, so far as you are interested 
in modern art — will necessarily have to put yourselves 
under the discipline of the Greek or chiaroscuro 
school, which is directed primarily to the attainment 
of the power of representing form by pure contrast of 
light and shade. I say, the *' discipline " of the Greek 
school, both because, followed faithfully, it is indeed a 
severe one, and because to follow it at all is, for per- 
sons fond of color, often a course of painful self-denial, 



286 LECTURES ON ART, 

from which young students are eager to escape. And 
yet, when the laws of both schools are rightly obeyed 
the most perfect discipline is that of the colorists ; for 
they see and draw everything, while the chiaroscurists 
must leave much indeterminate in mystery, or invisi- 
ble in gloom ; and there are therefore many licentious 
and vulgar forms of art connected with the chiaros- 
curo school, both in painting and etching, which have 
no parallel among the colorists. But both schools, 
rightly followed, require, first of all, absolute accuracy 
of delineation. This you need not hope to escape. 
Whether you fill your spaces with colors, or with 
shadows, they must equally be of the true outline and 
in true gradations. I have been thirty years telling 
modern students of art this in vain. I mean to say it 
to you only once, for the statement is too important to 
be weakened by repetition. 

Without perfect delineation of form and perfect grada- 
tion of space, neither noble color is possible, nor noble 
light. 

160. It may make this more believable to you if I 
put beside each other a piece of detail from each school. 
I gave you the St. John of Cima da Conegliano for a 
type of the color school. Here is one of the sprays of 
oak which rise against the sky of it in the distance, 
enlarged to about its real size (Edu. 12). I hope to 
draw it better for you at Venice ; but this will show 
you with what perfect care the colorist has followed 



I 



i 



LIGHT. 287 

the outline of every leaf in the sky. Beside it, I put 
a chiaroscurist drawing (at least, a photograph of one), 
Durer^s, from nature, of the common wild wall-cab- 
bage (Edu. 32). It is the most perfect piece of delinea- 
tion by flat tint I have even seen, in its mastery of 
the perspective of every leaf, and its attainment al- 
most of the bloom of texture, merely by its exquisitely 
tender and decisive laying of the color. These two 
examples ought, I think, to satisfy you as to the preci- 
sion of outline of both schools, and the power of ex- 
pression which may be obtained by flat tints laid with- 
in such outline. 

161. ]N"ext, here are two examples of the gradated 
shading expressive of the forms within the outline, by 
two masters of the chiaroscuro school. The first (S. 12) 
shows you Lionardo's method of work, both with 
chalk and the silver point. The second (S. 302), 
Turner's work in mezzotint ; both masters doing their 
best. Observe that this plate of Turner's, which he 
worked on so long that it was never published, is of a 
subject peculiarly depending on effects of mystery and 
concealment, the fall of the Reuss under the Devil's 
Bridge on the St. Gothard (the old bridge ; you may 
still see it under the existing one, which Avas built 
since Turner's drawing was made). If ever outline 
could be dispensed H^ ith, you would think it might be 
so in this confusion of cloud, foam, and darkness. But 
here is Turner's own etching on the plate, (Edu. 35 F), 



288 LECTURES ON ART. 

made under the mezzotint ; and of all the studies of 
rock outline made by his hand, it is the most decisive 
and quietly complete. 

162. Again ; in the Lionardo sketches, many parts 
are lost in obscurity, or are left intentionally uncertain 
and mysterious, even in the light; and you might at 
first imagine some permission of escape had been here 
given you from the terrible law of delineation. But 
the slightest attempts to copy them will show you 
that the terminal lines are inimitably subtle, unac- 
cusably true and filled by gradations of shade so de- 
termined and measured, that the addition of a grain of 
the lead or chalk as large as the fil^ent of a moth*s 
wing, would make an appreciable difference in them. 

This is grievous, you think, and hopeless. No, it is 
delightful and full of hope: delightful, to see what 
marvelous things can be done by men; and full of 
hope, if your hope is the right one, of being one day 
able to rejoice more in what others are, than in what 
you are yourself, and more in the strength that is for- 
ever above you, than in that you can ever attain. 

163. But you can attain much, if you will work 
reverently and patiently, and hope for no success 
through ill-regulated effort. It is, however, most as- 
suredly at this point of your study that the full strain 
on your patience will begin. The exercises in line- 
drawing and flat laying of color are irksome; but they 
are definite, and within certain limits, sure to be sue- 



I 



LIQET. 289 

cessf ul if practiced with moderate care. But the ex- 
pression of form by shadow requires more subtle pa- 
tience, and involves the necessity of frequent and 
mortifying failure, not to speak of the self-denial which 
I said was needful in persons fond of color, to draw in 
mere light and shade. If, indeed, you were going to 
be artists, or could give any great length of time to 
study, it might be possible for you to learn wholly 
in the Venetian school, and to reach form through 
color. But witliout the most intense application this 
is not possible ; and practically, it will be necessary 
for you, as soon as you have gained the power of out- 
lining accurately, and of laying flat color, to learn to 
express solid form as shown by light and shade only. 
And there is this great advantage in doing so, that 
many forms are more or less disguised by color, and 
that we can only represent them completely to others, 
or rapidly and easily record them for ourselves, by the 
use of shade alone. A single instance will show you 
what I mean. Perhaps there are few flowers of which 
the impression on the eye is more definitely of flat 
color than the scarlet geranium. But you will find, if 
you were to try to paint it — first, that no pigment 
could approach the beauty of its scarlet ; and secondly, 
that the brightness of the hue dazzled the eye, and 
prevented its following the real arrangement of the 
cluster of flowers. I have drawn for you here (at least 
this is a mezzotint from my drawing), a single cluster 



290 LECTURES ON ART. 

of the scarlet geranium, in mere light and shade (Edu. 
32 B.), and I think you will feel that its domed form, 
and the flat lying of the petals one over the other, in 
the vaulted roof of it, can be seen better thus than if 
they had been painted scarlet. 

164. Also this study will be useful to you, in show- 
ing how entirely effects of light depend on delineation 
and gradation of spaces, and not on methods of shad- 
ing. And this is the second great practical matter I 
want you to remember to-day. All effects of light and 
shade depend, not on the method or execution of 
shadow^s, but on their rightness of place, form and 
depth. There is indeed a loveliness of execution 
added to the rightness, by the great masters, but you 
cannot obtain that till you become one. Shadow can- 
not be laid thoroughly well, any more than lines can 
be drawn steadily, but by a long practiced hand, and 
the attempts to imitate the shading of fine draughts- 
men, by dotting and hatching, are just as ridiculous as 
it would be to endeavor to imitate their instantaneous 
lines by a series of re-touchings. You will often indeed 
see in Lionardo's work and in Michael Angelo's, shadow 
wrought laboriously to an extreme of fineness; but 
when you look into it, you will find that they have al- 
ways been drawing more and more form within the 
space, and never finishing for the sake of added 
texture, but of added fact. And all those effects of 
transparency and reflected light, aimed at in com- 



LIGHT. 291 

mon chalk drawings, are wholly spurious. For since, 
as I told you, ail lights are shades compared to higher 
lights, and lights only as compared to' lower ones, it 
follows that there can be no difference in their quahty 
as such ; but that light is opaque when it expresses 
substance, and transparent when it expresses space ; 
and shade is also opaque when it expresses substance, 
and transparent when it expresses space. But it is 
not, even then, transparent in the common sense of 
that word ; nor is its appearance to be obtained by dot- 
ting or cross hatching, but by touches so tender as to 
look like mist. And now we find the use of having 
Lionardo for our guide. He is supreme in all questions 
of execution, and in his twenty -eighth chapter, you 
will find that shadows are to be ^'dolcee sfuwose^'^ 
to be tender, and look as if they were exhaled, or 
breathed on the paper. Then, look at any of Michael 
Angelo's finished drawings, or of Correggio's sketches 
and you will see that the true nurse of light is in art, 

as in nature, the cloud ; a misty and tender darkness, 

I 
made lovely by gradation. 

165. And how absolutely independent it is of ma- 
terial or method of production, how absolutely depen- 
dent on Tightness of place and depth — there are now 
before you instances enough to prove. Here is Diir- 
er's work in flat color, represented by the photograph 
in its smoky brown ; Turner's in washed sepia, and in 
mezzotint ; Lionardo's, in pencil and in chalk ; on the 



293 LECTURES ON ART. 

screen in front of you a large study in charcoal. In 
every one of, these drawings, the material of shadow 
is absolutely opaque. But photograph-stain, chalk, 
lead, ink, or charcoal — every one of them, laid by the 
master's hand, becomes full of light by gradation only. 
Here is a moonlight (Edu. 31 B.), in which you would 
think the moon shone through every cloud; yet the 
clouds are mere single dashes of sepia, imitated by the 
brown stain of a photograph ; similarly, in these plates 
from the Liber Studiorum the white paper becomes 
transparent or opaque, exactly as the master chooses. 
Here, on the granite rock of the St. Gothard (S. 302), 
is white paper made opaque, every light represents 
solid bosses of rock, or balls of foam. But in this 
study of twilight (S. 303), the same white paper (coarse 
old stuff it is, too !) is made as transparent as crystal, 
and every fragment of it represents clear and far away 
light in the sky of evening in Italy. From which the 
practical conclusix)n for you is, that you are never to 
trouble yourselves with any questions as to the means 
of shade or light, but only with the right government 
of the means at your disposal. And it is a most grave 
error in the system of many of our public drawing- 
schools that the students are permitted to spend weeks 
of labor in giving attractive appearance, by delicacy 
of texture, to chiaroscuro drawings in which every 
form is false, and every relation of depth untrue. A 
most unhappy form of error ; for it not only delays, 



I 



LIGHT, 293 

and often wholly arrests, their advance in their own 
art ; but it prevents what ought to take place co-rela- 
tively with their executive practice, the formation of 
tneir taste by the accurate study of the models from 
which they draw. I do not. doubt but that you have 
more pleasure in looking at the large drawing of the 
arch of Bourges, behind me (Eef. 1), than at common 
sketches of sculpture. The reason you like it is, that 
the whole effort of the workman has been to show 
you, not his own skill in shading, but the play of the 
light on the surfaces of the leaves, which is lovely, be- 
cause the sculpture itself is first-rate. And I must so far 
anticipate what we shall discover when we come to 
the subject of sculpture, as to tell you the two main 
principles of good sculpture : first, that its masters 
think before all other matters of the right placing of 
masses ; secondly, that they give life by flexure of sur- 
face, not by quantity of detail ; for sculpture is indeed 
only light and shade drawing in stone. 

166. Much that I have endeavored to teach on this 
subject has been gravfely misunderstood, by both 
young painters and sculptors, especially by the latter. 
Because I am always urging them to imitate organic 
forms, they think if they carve quantities of flowers 
and leaves, and copy them from the life, they have 
done all that is needed. But the difliculty is not to 
carve quantities of leaves. Anybody can do that. 
The difficulty is, never anywhere to have an unneces- 



294 LECTURES ON ART, 

sary leaf. Over the arch on the right, you see there is 
a cluster of seven, with their short stalks springing 
from a thick stem. Now, you could not turn one of 
those leaves a hair's-breath out of its place, nor thicken 
one of their stems, nor alter the angle at which each 
slips over the next one, without spoiling the whole, as 
much as you would a piece of melody by missing a 
note. That is disposition of masses. Again, in the 
group on the left, while the placing of every leaf is 
just as skillful, they are made more interesting yet by 
the lovely undulation of their surfaces, so that not one 
of them is in equal light with another. And that is so 
in all good sculpture, without exception. From the 
Elgin marbles down to the lightest tendril that curls 
round a capital in the thirteenth century, every piece 
of stone that has been touched by the hand of a mas- 
ter, becomes soft with under-life, not resembling na- 
ture merely in skin-texture, nor in fibres of leaf, or 
veins of flesh ; but in the broad, tender unspeakably 
subtle undulation of its organic form. 

167. Eeturning then to the question of our own 
practice, I believe that all diflSculties in method will 
vanish, if only you cultivate with care enough the 
habit of accurate observation, and if you think only 
of making your light and shade true, whether it be 
delicate or not. But there are three divisions or de- 
grees of truth to be sought for, in light and shade, by 
three several modes of study, which 1 must ask you to 
distinguish carefully. 



i 



LIGHT. 295 

I. When objects are lighted by the direct rays of 
the sun, or by direct light entering irom a window 
one side of them is of course in light, the other in 
shade, and the forms in the mass are exhibited sys- 
tematically by the force of the rays falling on it; 
(those having most power of illumination which strike 
most vertically) ; and note that there is, therefore, to 
every solid curvature of surface, a necessarily propor- 
tioned gradation of light, the gradation on a parabolic 
solid being different from the gradation on an elliptical 
or spherical one. Now, when yo\XY purpose is to rep- 
resent and learn the anatomy, or otherwise character- 
istic forms, of any object, it is best to place it in this 
kind of direct light, and to draw it as it is seen when 
we look at it in a direction at right angles to that of 
the ray. This is the ordinary academical way of 
studying form. Lionardo seldom practises any other 
in his real work, though he directs many others in his 
treatise. 

168. The great importance of anatomical knowledge 
to the painters of the sixteenth century rendered this 
method of study very frequent with them ; it almost 
wholly regulated their schools of engraving, and has 
been the most frequent system of drawing in art-schools 
since (to the very inexpedient exclusion of others). 
When you study objects in this way, and it will indeed 
be well to do so often, though not exclusively, observe 
always one main principle. Divide the light from the 



296 LECTORES ON ART. 

darkness frankly at first : all over the subject let 
there be no doubt which is which. Separate them one 
from the other as they are separated in the moon, or 
on the world itself, in day and night. Then gradate 
your lights with the utmost subtilty possible to you ; 
but let your shadows alone, until near the termination 
of the drawing : then put quickly into them what far- 
ther energy they need, thus gaining the reflected lights 
out of their original flat gloom ; but generally not 
looking much for reflected lights. Nearly all young 
students (and too many advanced masters) exaggerate 
them. It is good to see a drawing come out of its 
ground like a vision of light only ; the shadows lost, 
or disregarded in the vague of space. In vulgar 
chiaroscuro the shades are so full of reflection that they 
look as if some one had been walking round the object 
with a candle, and the student, by that help, peering 
into its crannies. 

169. II. But in the reality of nature, very few ob- 
jects are seen in this accurately lateral manner, or 
lighted by unconfused direct rays. Some are all in 
shadow, some all in light, some near, and vigorously de- 
fined ; others dim and faint in aerial distance. The 
study of these various effects and forces of light, which 
we may call aerial chiaroscuro, is a far more subtle 
one than that of the rays exhibiting organic form 
(which for distinction's sake we may call " formal " 
chiaroscuro), since the degrees of light from the sun 



LIGHT. 297 

itself to the blackness of night, are far beyond any 
literal imitation. In order to produce a mental im- 
pression of the facts, two distinct methods may be 
followed: the first, to shade downw^ard from the 
lights making everything darker in due proportion, 
until the scale of our power being ended, the mass of 
the picture is lost in shade. The second, to assume 
the points of extreme darkness for a basis, and to 
light everything above these in due proportion, till the 
mass of the picture is lost in light. 

170. Thus, in Turner's sepia drawing " Isis " (Edu. 
31), he begins with the extreme light in the sk}^, and 
shades down from that till he is forced to represent 
the near trees and pool as one mass of blackness. In 
his drawing of the Greta (S. 2) he begins with the 
dark brown shadow of the bank on the left, and illumr 
nates up from tliat, till, in his distance, trees, hills, 
sky, and clouds, are all lost in broad light, so that you 
can hardly see the distinction between hills and sky. 
The second of these methods is in general the best for 
color, though great painters unite both in their prac- 
tice, according to the character of their subject. The 
first method is never pursued in color but by inferior 
painters. It is, nevertheless, of great importance to 
make studies of chiaroscuro in this first manner for 
some time, as a preparation for coloring; and this 
for many reasons, which it would take too long to 
state now. I shall expect you to have confidence ir? 



298 LECTURES ON ART. 

me when I assure you of the necessity of this study, 
and ask you to make good use of the examples from 
the Liber Studiorum which I have placed in your ed- 
ucational series. 

171. III. "Whether in formal or aerial chiaroscuro 
it is optional with the student to make the local color 
of objects a part of his shadow, or to consider the 
high lights of every color as white. For instance, a 
chiaroscurist of Lionardo's school, drawing a leopard, 
would take no notice whatever of the spots, but only 
give the shadows which expressed the anatomy. And 
it is indeed necessary to be able to do this, and to 
make drawings of the forms of things as if they were 
sculptured, and had no color. But in general and 
more especially in the practice which is to guide you 
to color, it is better to regard the local color as part 
of the general dark and light to be imitated ; and, as 
I told you at first, to consider all nature merely as a 
mosaic of diff^ent colors, to be imitated one by one 
in simplicity. But good artists vary their methods 
according to their subject and material. In general, 
Dllrer takes little account of local color ; but in wood- 
cuts of armorial bearings (one with peacock's feathers 
I shall get for you some day) takes great delight in it; 
while one of the chief merits of Bewick is the ease and 
visor v/ith which he uses his black and white for the 
colors of plumes. Also, every great artist looks for 
iind expresses, that character of his subject which is 



I 



LIGHT, 299 

best to be rendered by the instrument in his hand, and 
the material he works on. Give Valasquez or Veron- 
ese a leopard to paint, the first thing they think of 
will be its spots ; give it to Diirer to engrave, and he 
will set himself at the fur and whiskers ; give it a 
Greek to carve, and he will only think of its jaws and 
limbs; each doing what is absolutely best with the 
means at his disposal. 

172. The details of practice in these various meth- 
ods I will endeavor to explain to you by distinct ex- 
amples in your educational series, as we proceed in 
our work; for the present, let me, in closing, recom- 
mend to you once more with great earnestness the ])a- 
tient endeavor to render the chiaroscuro of landscape 
in the manner of the Liber Studiorum ; and this the 
rather, because you might easily suppose that the fa- 
cility of obtaining photographs which render such 
effects, as it seems, with absolute truth and with un- 
approachable subtlety, superceded the necessity of 
study, and the use of sketching. Let me assure you, 
once for all, that photographs supercede no single 
quality nor use of fine art, and have so much in com- 
mon with nature, that they even share her temper of 
parsimony, and will themselves give you nothing val 
uable that you do not work for. They supercede no 
good art, for the definition of art is '' human labor 
regulated by human design," and this design or evidence 
of active intellect in choice and arrangement, is the es- 
sential part of the work ; which, so long as you cannot 



300 LECTURES ON ART. 

perceive, you perceive no art whatsoever; which, when 
once you do perceive, you will perceive also to be re- 
placeable by no mechanism. But, farther, photographs 
will give you nothing you do not work for. They are 
invaluable for record of some kinds of facts, and for giv- 
ing transcripts of drawings by great masters ; but neither 
in the photographed scene, nor photographed drawing 
will you see any true good, more than in the things 
themselves, until you have given the appointed price 
in your own attention and toil. And when once you 
have paid this price, you will not care for photographs 
of landscape. They are not true, though they seem 
so. They are merely spoiled nature. If it is not 
human design you are looking for, there is more beauty 
in tlie next wayside bank than in all the sun-blackened 
paper you could collect in a lifetime. Go and look at 
the real landscape, and take care of it ; do not think 
you can get the good of it in a black stain portable in 
a folio. But if you care for human thought and pas- 
sion, then learn yourselves to watch the course and 
fall of the light by whose influence you live, and to 
share in the joy of human spirits in the heavenly gifts 
of sunbeam and shade. For I tell you truly, that to 
a quiet heart, and healthy brain, and industrious 
hand there is more delight, and use, in the dappling 
of one wood-glade with flowers and sunshine, than to 
the restless, heartless, and idle could be brought by a 
panorama of a belt of the world, photographed round 
the equator. 



OOLOR. 301 



LECTURE Vn. 

COLOR. 

1Y3. To-day I must try to complete our elementary 
sketch of schools of art, by tracing the course of 
those which were distinguished by faculty of color, 
and afterward to deduce from the entire scheme ad- 
visable methods of immediate practice. 

You remember that, for the type of the early 
schools of color, I chose their work in glass ; as for 
that of the early schools of chiaroscuro, I chose their 
work in clay. 

I had two reasons for this. First, that the peculiar 
skill of colorists is seen most intelligibly in their woi'k 
in glass or in enamel ; secondly, that nature herself 
produces all her loveliest colors in some kind of solid 
or liquid glass or crystal. The rainbow is painted on 
a shower of melted glass, and the colors of the opal 
are produced in vitreous flint mixed with water ; the 
green and blue, and golden or amber brown of flow- 
ing water is in surface glossy, and in motion, " sjplen- 
didor vitroy And the loveliest colors ever granted to 
human sight — those of morning and evening clouds 



802 LECTURES ON ART, 

before or after rain — are produced on minute particles 
of finely-divided water, or perhaps sometimes, ice. 
But more than this. If you examine with a lens some 
of the richest colors of flowers, as, for instance, those 
of the gentian and dianthus, you w^ill find their text- 
ure is produced by a crystalline or sugary frost-work 
upon them. In the lychnis of the high Alps, the red 
and white have a kind of sugary bloom, as rich as it is 
delicate. It is indescribable; but if you can fancy 
very powdery and crystalline snow mixed with the 
softest cream, and then dashed wuth carmine, it may 
give you some idea of the look of it. There are no 
colors, either in the nacre of shells, or the plumes of 
birds and insects, which are so pure as those of clouds- 
opal or flow^ers ; but the force of purple and blue in 
some butterflies, and the methods of clouding, and 
strength of burnished luster, in plumage like the pea- 
cock's, give them more universal interest; in some 
birds, also, as in our own kingfisher, the color nearly 
reaches a floral preciousness. The luster in most, how- 
ever, is metallic rather than vitreous ; and the vitreous 
always gives the purest hue. Entirely common and 
vulgar compared with these, yet to be noticed as complet- 
ing the crystalline or vitreous system, we have the colors 
of gems. The green of the emerald is the best of these ; 
but at its best is as vulgar as house-painting beside the 
green of bird's plumage or of clear water. No dia- 
mond shows color so pure as a dewdrop ; the ruby is 



1 



COLOR. 303 

like the pink of an ill-dyed and half -washed-out 
print, compared to the dianthus ; and the carbuncle 
is usually quite dead unless set with a foil, and even 
then is not prettier than the seed of a pomegranate. 
The opal is, however, an exception. When pure and 
uncut in its native rock, it presents the most lovely 
colors that can be seen in the world, except those of 
clouds. 

We have thus in nature, chiefly obtained by crystal- 
line conditions, a series of groups of entirely delicious 
hues ; and it is one of the best signs that the bodily 
system is in a healthy state when we can see these 
clearly in their most delicate tints, and enjoy them 
fully and simply, with the kind of enjoyment that 
children have in eating sweet things. I shall place a 
piece of rock opal on the table in your working-room; 
if on fine days you will sometimes dip it in water, 
take it into sunshine, and examine it with a lens of 
moderate power, you may always test your progress 
in sensibility to color by the degree of pleasure it 
gives you. 

174. E'ow, the course of our main color schools is 
briefly this : First, we have, returning to our hexag- 
onal scheme, line ; then spaces filled with pure color ; 
and then masses expressed or rounded with pure color. 
And during these two stages the masters of color de- 
light in the purest tints, and endeavor as far as pos- 
sible to rival those of opals and flowers. In saying 



304 LECTURES ON ART, 

^' the purest tints," I do not mean the simplest types 
of red, blue and yellow, but the most pure tints ob- 
tainable by their combinations. 

1Y5, You remember 1 told you, when the colorists 
painted masses or projecting spaces, they, aiming 
always at color, perceived from the first and held to 
the last the fact that shadows, though of course darker 
than the lights with reference to which they are 
shadows are not therefore necessarily less vigorous 
colors, but perhaps more vigorous. Some of the most 
beautiful blues and purples in nature, for instance, are 
those of mountains in shadow against amber sky ; and 
the darkness of the hollow in the center of a wild rose 
is one glow of orange fire, owing to the quantity of 
its yellow stamens. 

Well, the Venetians always saw this, and all great 
colorists see it, and are thus separated from the non- 
colorists or schools of mere chiaroscuro, not by differ- 
ence in style merely but by being right while the 
others are wrong. It is an absolute fact that shadows 
are as much colors as lights are ; and whoever repre- 
sents them by merely the subdued or darkened tint of 
the light, represents them falsely. I particularly want 
you to observe that this is no matter of taste, but fact. 
If you are especially sober-minded, you may indeed 
choose sober colors where Venetians w^ould have 
chosen gay ones ; that is a matter of taste : you may 
think it proper for a hero to w^ear a dress without pat- 



COLOR. 305 

terns on it, rather than an embroidered one ; that is 
similary a matter of taste : but, though you may also 
think it would be dignified for a hero's limbs to be all 
black, or brown, on the shaded side of them, yet, if 
you are using color at all you cannot so have him to 
3^our mind, except by falsehood ; he never, under any 
circumstances, could be entirely black or brown on one 
side of him. 

176. In this, then, the Yenetians are separate from 
other schools by rightness, and they are so to their 
last days. Venetian painting is in this matter always 
right. But also in their early days, the colorists are 
separated from other schools by their contentment 
with tranquil cheerfulness of light; by their never 
wanting to be dazzled. None of their lights are flash- 
ing or blinding ; they are soft, winning, precious ; 
lights of pearl, not of lime : only, you know, on this 
condition they cannot have sunshine : their day is the 
day of Paradise ; they need no candle, neither light of 
the sun, in their cities ; and everything is seen clear, 
as through crystal, far or near. 

This holds to the end of the fifteenth century. Then 
they begin to see that this, beautiful as it may be, is 
still a make-believe light ; that we do not live in the 
inside of a pearl ; but in an atmosphere through which 
a burning sun shines thwartedly, and over which a 
sorrowful night must far prevail. And then the 
chiaroscurists succeed in persuading them of the fact 



306 LECTURES ON ART, 

that there is mystery in the day as in the night, and 
show them how constantly to see truly, is to see 
dimly. And also they teach them the brilliancy ot 
liffht, and the deo^ree in which it is raised from the 
darkness ; and, instead of their sweet and pearly 
peace, tempt them to look for the strength of flame 
and coruscation of lightning, and flash of sunshine on 
armor and on points of spears. 

177. The noble painters take the lesson nobly, 
alike for gloom or flame. Titian with deliberate 
strength, Tintoret with stormy passion, read it, side 
by side. Titian deepens the hues of his Assumption, 
as of his Entombment, into a solemn twilight ; Tin- 
toret involves his earth in coils of volcanic cloud, and 
withdraws, through circle flaming above circle, the 
distant light of Paradise. Both of them, becoming 
naturalist and human, add the veracity of Holbein's 
intense portraiture to the glow and the dignity they 
had themselves inherited from the Masters of Peace: 
at the same moment another, as strong as they, and in 
pure felicity of art-faculty, even greater than they, 
but trained in a lower school — Velasquez — produced 
the miracles of color and shadow-painting, which made 
Reynolds say of him, "What we all do with labor, he 
does with ease ; " and one more, Correggio, uniting 
the sensual element of the Greek schools with their 
gloom, and their light with their beauty, and all these 
with the Lombardic color, became, as since I think it 



COLOR. 307 

has been admitted without question, the captain of 
the painter's art as such. Other men have nobler 
or more numerous gifts, but as a painter, master of the 
art of laying color so as to be lovely, Correggio is alone. 

178. I said the noble men learned their lesson 
nobly. The base men also, and necessarily, learn it 
basely. The great men rise from color to sunlight. 
The base ones fall from color to candlelight. To-day, 
^'non ragiouiam di lor^"^ but let us see what this great 
change which perfects the art of painting mainly con- 
sists in, and means. For though we are only at pres- 
ent speaking of technical matters, every one of them, 
I can scarcely too often repeat, is the outcome and sign 
of a mental character, and you can only understand 
the folds of the veil, by those of the form it veils. 

179. The complete painters, we find, have brought 
dimness and mystery into their method of coloring. 
That means that the world all round them has resolved 
to dream, or to believe, no more ; but to know, and to 
see. And instantly all knowledge and sight are given, 
no more as in the Gothic times, through a window of 
glass brightly, but as through a telescope-glass, darkly. 
Your cathedral window shut you from the true sky, 
and illumined 3^ou with a vision ; your telescope leads 
you to the sky, but darkens its light, and reveals neb- 
ula beyond nebula, far and farther, and to no conceive- 
able farthest — unresolvable. That is what the mys- 
tery means. 



308 LECTURES ON ART. 

180. Next, what does that Greek opposition of 
black and white mean ? 

In the sweet crystalline time of color, the painters, 
whether on glass or canvas, employed intricate pat- 
terns, in order to mingle hues beautifully with each 
other, and make one perfect melody of them all. But 
in the great naturalist school, they like their patterns 
to come in the Greek way, dashed dark on light — 
gleaming light out of dark. That means also that the 
world round them has again returned to the Greek 
conviction, that all nature, especially human nature, is 
not entirely melodious nor luminous ; but a barred and 
broken thing ; that saints have their foibles, sinners 
their forces ; that the most luminous virtue is often 
only a flash, and the blackest-looking fault is some- 
times only a stain : and, without confusing in the 
least black with white, they can forgive, or even take 
delight in things that are like the vef3pU, dappled. 

181. You have then — first, mystery. Secondly, 
opposition of dark and light. Then, lastly, whatever 
truth of form the dark and light can show. 

That is to say, truth altogether, and resignation to 
it, and quiet, and quiet resolve to make the best of it. 
And therefore, portraiture of living men, women, and 
children, no more of saints, cherubs, or demons. So 
here I have brought for your standards of perfect art, 
a little maiden of the Strozzi family, with her dog, by 
Titian ; and a little princess of the house of Savoy, by 



COLOR. 309 

Vandyke ; and Charles the Fifth, by Titian ; and a 
queen by Yelasquez ; and an English girl in a brocaded 
gown, by Reynolds ; and an English physician in his 
plain coat and wig, by Reynolds : and if you do not 
like them, I cannot help myself, for I can find nothing 
better for you. 

182. Better ? I must pause at the word. Nothing 
stronger, certainly, nor so strong. Nothing so won- 
derful, so inimitable, so keen in unprejudiced and un- 
biased sight. 

Yet better, perhaps, the sight that was guided by 
a sacred will ; the power that could be taught to 
w^eaker hands ; the work that was faultless, though 
not inimitable, bright with felicity of heart, and con- 
summate in a disciplined and companionable skill. 
You will find, when I can place in your hands the 
notes on Yerona, which I read at the Royal Institu- 
tion, that I have ventured to call the aera of painting 
represented by John Bellini, the time " of the masters." 
Truly, they deserved the name, who did nothing but 
what was lovely, and taught only what was right. 
These mightier, who succeeded them, crowned, but 
closed, the dynasties of art, and since their day paint- 
ing has never flourished more. 

183. There were many reasons for this, without 
fault of theirs. They were exponents, in the first 
place, of the change in all men's minds from civil and 
religious to merely domestic passion; the love of their 



310 LECTURES ON ART, 

gods and their country had contracted itself now into 
that of their domestic circle, which was little more 
than the halo of themselves. You will see the reflec- 
tion of this change in painting at once by comparing 
the two Madonnas (S. 37, John Bellini's, and Eaphael's, 
called " della Seggiola "). Bellini's Madonna cares for 
all creatures through her child; Eaphael's, for her 
child only. 

Again, the world round these painters had become 
sad and proud, instead of happy and humble — its do- 
mestic peace was darkened by irreligion, and made 
restless by pride. And the Hymen, whose statue this 
fair English girl of Eeynold's thought must decorate 
(S. 43), is blind and holds a coronet. 

Again, in the splendid power of realization, which 
these greatest of artists had reached, there was the 
latent possibility of amusement by deception, and of 
excitement by sensualism. And Dutch trickeries of 
base resemblance, and French and English fancies of 
insidious beauty, soon occupied the eyes of the popu- 
lace of Europe, too restless and wretched now to care 
for the sweet earth-berries and Madonna's ivy of Cima, 
and too ignoble to perceive Titian's color, or Correg- 
gio's shade. 

184. Enough sources of evil were here, in the tem- 
per and power of the consummate art. In its practi- 
cal methods there was another, the fatallest of all. 
These great iirtists brought with them mystery, de- 



I 



COLOR. 311 

spondency, aotnesticity, sensuality ; of ali chese, good 
came, as well as e/il. One thing more they brought, 
of which nothing but evil ever comes, or can come — 
liberty. 

By the discipline of five hundred years they had 
learned and inherited such power, that whereas all for- 
mer painters could be right only by effort, they could 
be right with ease ; and whereas all former painters 
could be right only under restraint, they could be 
right free. Tintoret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, 
Reynold's, and Yela.squez's, are all as free as the air, 
and yet right. "How very fine," said everybody. 
Unquestionably, very fine. Next, said everybody, 
" What a grand discovery ! Here is the finest work 
ever done, and it is quite free. Let us all be free then, 
and what fine things shall we not do also ! " With 
what results we too well know. 

Nevertheless, remember you are to delight in the 
freedom won by these mighty men through obedience 
though you are not to covet it. Obey, and you also 
shall be free in time ; but in these minor things, as well 
as in great, it is only right service which is perfect 
freedom. 

185. This, broadly, is the history of the early and 
late color-schools. The first of these I shall call gener 
ally, henceforward, the school of crystal; the other 
that of clay : potter's clay, or human, are too sorrow- 
fully the same, as far as art is concerned. Now re- 



312 LECTURES ON ART. ^ 

member, in practice, you cannot follow both these 
schools ; you must distinctly adopt the principles of 
one or the other. I will put the means of following 
either within your reach ; and according to your dis- 
positions you will choose one or the other : all I have 
to guard you against is the mistake of thinking you 
can unite the two. If you want to paint (even in the 
most distant and feeble way) in the Greek school, the 
school of Lionardo, Correggio, and Turner, you cannot 
design colored windows, nor Angelican paradises. If 
on the other hand, you choose to live in the peace of 
paradise, you cannot share in the gloomy triumphs of 
the earth. 

186. And, incidentally note, as a practical matter 
of immediate importance, that painted windows have 
nothing to do with chiaroscuro. The virtue of glass 
is to be transparent everywhere. If you care to build 
a palace of jewels, painted glass is richer than all the 
treasures of Aladdin's lamp ; but if you like pictures 
better than jewels, yoa must come into broad daylight 
to paint them. A picture in colored glass is one of the 
most vulgar of barbarisms, and only fit to be ranked 
with the gauze transparencies and chemical illumina- 
tions of the sensational stage. Also, put out of your 
minds at once all question about difficulty of getting 
color ; in glass we have all the colors that are wanted, 
only we do not know either how to choose, or how to 
connect them ; and we are always trying to get them 



COLOR 313 

bright, when their real virtue is to be deep, and tender 
and subdued. We will have a thorough study of 
painted glass soon : meanwhile I merely give you a type 
of its perfect style, in two windows from Chalons sur 
Marne (S. 141). 

187. You will have then to choose between these 
two modes of thought : for my own part, with what 
poor gift and skill is in me, I belong wholly to the 
chiaroscurist school; and shall teach you therefore 
chiefly that which I am best able to teach : and the 
rather, that it is only in this school that you can fol- 
low out the study either of natural history or landscape. 
The form of a wild animal, or the wrath of a mountain 
torrent, would both be revolting (or in a certain sense 
invisible) to the calm fantasy of a painter in the schools 
of crystal. He must lay his lion asleep in St. Jerome's 
study beside his tame partridge and spare slippers \ 
lead the appeased river by alternate azure promonto- 
ries, and restrain its courtly little streamlets with mar 
gins of marble. But, on the other hand, your studies 
of mythology and literature may best be connected 
with these schools of purest and calmest imagination ; 
and their discipline will be useful to you in yet another 
direction, and that a very important one. It will 
teach you to take delight in little things, and develop 
in you the joy which all men should feel in purity and 
order, not only in pictures but in reality. For, indeed, 
the best art of this school of fantasy may at last be 



314 . LEOTURKS ON ART. 

in reality, and the chiarosurists, true in ideal, may be 
less helpful in act. We cannot arrest sunsets nor 
carve mountains, but we may turn every English 
homestead, if we choose, into a picture by Cima or 
John Bellini, which shall be " no counterfeit, but the 
true and perfect image of life indeed." 

188. For the present, however, and yet for some lit- 
tle time during your progress, you will not have to 
choose your school. For both, as we have seen, begin 
in delineation, and both proceed by filling flat spaces 
with an even tint. And therefore this will be the 
course of work for you, founded on all that we have 
seen. 

Having learned to measure, and draw a pen line with 
some steadiness (the geometrical exercises for this pur- 
pose being properly school, not university work), you 
shall have a series of studies from the plants which 
are of chief importance in the history of art; first 
from their real forms, and then from the conventional 
and heraldic expressions of them ; then we will take 
examples of the filling of ornamental forms with flat 
color in Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic design ; and then 
we will advance to animal forms treated in the same 
severe way, and so to the patterns and color designs 
on animals themselves. And when we are sure of our 
firmness of hand and accuracy of eye, we will go on 
into light and shade. 

189. In process of time, these series of exercises 



COLOR. 315 

will, I hope, be sufficiently complete and systematic to 
show its purpose at a glance. But during the present 
year, I shall content myself with placing a few exam- 
ples of these different kinds of practice in your rooms 
for work, explaining in the catalogue the position they 
will ultimately occupy, and the technical points of 
process into which it is of no use to enter in a genera^ 
lecture. After a little time spent in copying these^ 
your own predilections must determine your future 
course of study ; only remember, whatever school you 
follow, it must be only to learn method, not to imitate 
result, and to acquaint yourselves with the minds of 
other men, but not to adopt them as your own. Be 
assured that no good can come of your work but as it 
arises simply out of your own true natures and the 
necessities of the time around you, though in many 
respects an evil one. You live in an age of base con- 
ceit and baser servility — ail age whose intellect is 
chiefly formed by pillage and occupied in desecration ; 
one day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of 
all the noble persons who made its intellectual or art 
life possible to it : an age without honest confidence 
enough in itself to carve a cherrj^-stone with an orig- 
inal fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the 
solar system, if it were allowed to meddle with it. In 
the midst of all this, you have to become lowly and 
strong ; to recognize the powers of others and to fulfill 
your own. I shall try to bring before you every form 



316 L EGTUBES ON ART. 

of ancient art, that 3^ou may read and profit by it, not 
imitate it. You shall draw Egyptian kings dressed in 
colors like the rainbow, and Doric gods, and Runic 
monsters, and Gothic monks — not that you may draw 
like Egyptians or Norsemen, nor yield yourselves pas- 
sively to be bound' by the devotion or infected with 
the delirium of the past, but that you may know truly 
what other men have felt during their poor span of 
life ; and open your own hearts to what the heavens 
and earth may have to tell j^ou in yours. 

Do not be surprised, therefore, nor^ provoked, if I 
give you at first strange things, and rude, to draw. 
As soon as you try them, you will find they are diffi- 
cult enough, yet, with care, entirely possible. As you 
go on drawing them they will become interesting, 
and, as soon as you understand them, you will be on 
the way to understand yourselves also. 

190. In closing this first course of lectures, I have 
one word more to say respecting the possible conse- 
quence of the introduction of art among the studies 
of the university. What art may do for scholarship, 
1 have no right to conjecture ; but what scholarship 
may do for art, I may in all modesty tell you. Hith- 
erto, great artists, though always gentlemen, have yet 
been too exclusively craftsmen. Art has been less 
thoughtful than we suppose ; it has taught much, but 
much, also, falsely. Many of the greatest pictures 
are enigmas; others, beautiful toys; others, harmful 



COLOR. 317 

and corrupting toys. In the loveliest there is some- 
thing weak ; in the greatest there is something guilty. 
And this, gentlemen, if you will, is the new thing that 
may come to pass — that the scholars of England may 
resolve to teach also with the silent power of the arts ; 
and that some among you may so learn and use them, 
that pictures may be painted which shall not be enig- 
mas any more, but open teachings of what can no 
otherwise be so well shown; which shall not be 
fevered or broken visions any more, but shall be filled 
with the indwelling light of self-possessed imagination ; 
which shall not be stained or enfeebled any more by 
evil passion, but glorious with the strength and 
chastity of noble human love; and which shall no 
more degrade or disguise the work of God in heaven, 
but testify of Him as here dwelling with men, and 
walking with them, not angry, in the garden of the 
earth. 



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By Sir 


By 


(Jeorge 


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